Category: DVRs

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DVR Storage Revisited: Chia Plotting SSD Drives

Those of you who’ve followed us here at in-koherence know that we’ve taken a skeptical eye to using SSDs in DVRs, although things started to turn around a couple years ago. Still, even with improved endurance and falling prices the good old hard drive reigned supreme. While they eventually suffer mechanical failure (usually degradation of the platters) after a time, they tend not to fail just because you’ve written a certain amount of data to them. In regular use the drive will suffer mechanical failure long before then. This isn’t the case with SSDs. The NAND flash cells can only be written a given number of times, and although most employ sophisticated algorithms to optimize the wear of those flash cells, you need to pay attention to a drive’s endurance rating.

But something interesting has happened in the storage market – high endurance and somewhat affordable SSDs have started to appear – thanks to the chia cryptocurrency of all things. And a reasonably-priced high-endurance SSD is just what’s needed for DVRs.

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Reach Out and Touch Someone (…or your TV). Thoughts on ATSC 3.0 broadcast apps.

Broadcast television has traditionally been a  prix fixe affair. A bunch of people shoot some video, slice it, stich it, and present it to you on your large screen TV to sit back and savor. If what appears doesn’t suit your palette, well, you can change the channel. Traditional broadcast TV has also been a largely lean back, consumptive experience without any chance to interact with or steer the program.

All that could change with ATSC 3.0 (aka NextGen TV). Continue reading “Reach Out and Touch Someone (…or your TV). Thoughts on ATSC 3.0 broadcast apps.”

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Breakthrough in DVR Storage and Time Shifting Rumored

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California (AB)  Koherence Labs, the R&D arm of consumer electronics consulting firm Koherence, LLC,  is rumored to have made a breakthrough in content recording. Dubbed “InfiniDVR,” the new technology allows  an effectively unlimited recording capacity and permits viewing of all shows that have ever been or will be broadcast.

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ATSC 3.0: DRM and Encryption

A bit more than a year ago I headed over to a former client’s headquarters to discuss a potential ATSC 3.0 project. The moment I stepped into the office I was swarmed by a group of engineers and managers with one primary question : are 3.0 broadcasts really going to be encrypted, and if so what DRM is going to be employed?

There’s been a lot of chatter about encryption of ATSC 3.0 broadcasts and what it means for free over-the-air TV. A lot of that discussion conflates encryption, content protection, and content rights management. This post will hopefully help in untangling things a bit while providing some context, and also some discussion around the unintended consequences that encryption may have on innovation in the consumer electronics space. Continue reading “ATSC 3.0: DRM and Encryption”

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Revisiting SSDs in DVRs

Previous posts at in-koherence have been rather skeptical of using SSDs as recording storage in DVRs. SSDs have a lifespan that is largely dictated by the amount of data written to them. This may not be much of a problem if you record one or two shows a day. However many users set up recordings for series which they might watch (but for some reason never find the time to…or maybe they decided it wasn’t such a great series after all, but who has time to cancel the subscription to the series?) This is amplified if multiple members of the household set up recordings on the DVR. The next thing you know it your four-tuner DVR is recording 20 hours of shows a day. For all its faults, the good old mechanical hard drive is superior in having a write limit that’s so high that it’s generally not considered.

But with rapidly falling prices, larger capacities (with correspondingly higher endurance ratings), and the increasing difficulty of finding non-SMR 2.5″ hard drives, the time has come to give SSDs a harder look. So we took a mid-grade SSD and ran the first SSD-based Project Entangle through its paces.

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