Project Entangle, Koherence’s OTA platform, hit a milestone over this weekend: it’s archive passed 100,000 hours of (unique) recorded OTA shows!
NextGen TV Arrives in the Bay Area!
It was a bit unexpected. And the programming isn’t exactly a showcase of what NextGen TV can deliver. But at long last the Bay Area has an ATSC 3.0 (aka NextGen TV) broadcast compliments of KBKF! After spending a couple years trekking to Phoenix, Santa Barbara and Las Vegas to go to the emissions it’s nice to have one in our own backyard. And we’re pleased to add ATSC 3.0 monitoring support at SFBayATSC!
KBKF is operated by Venture Technologies Group, LLC and broadcasts on VHF 6 from Mt. Loma Prieta. At the time of writing the 3.0 emission consists of a single PLP utilizing 64 QAM and an 8/15 code rate. This is a bit more robust than other 3.0 emissions, which often utilize 256 QAM, though at the expense of a lower capacity (~14 Mbit/s). In mid June two ROUTE/DASH services were being transmitted – a barker channel as 6-1 and UChan as 6-2. At the moment UChan has taken the 6-1 VC and the barker has signed off. Interestingly the services are using AAC audio. While this was prevalent in early 3.0 phases when AC-4 support for receivers and encoders was still under development, commercial deployments in the US are required to use AC-4. (The ATSC 3.0 specification provides for multiple audio codecs, but only a single codec is allowed in a region. In North America that codec is AC-4.)
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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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A Year of NOVID-19
It’s been a year a year like no other. Social distancing. Paper hoarding. DPE. Isolating ourselves to reduce spread and avoid becoming one of the afflicted. But after a year of not having to make excuses about ignoring your aunt’s friend request and finally watching that DVD you bought in 2005, there’s a ray of hope in combating STRM-NOVID-19 and a return to normalcy.
Entangle Update Halloween Edition: Spooky Action at a (Social) Distance
Yes we’re still alive! It’s been a crazy 2020. On top of pandemics, wildfires, and air quality bad enough to turn day into night, our WordPress installation has been plagued with issues preventing new posts from appearing. At long last it looks like we’ve exorcised the spirits haunting our site, so here’s what we’ve been up to while manually recovering posts from databases…
It’s been a busy year: ATSC 3.0 (aka NextGenTV) has moved from testing to reality and services have launched in Las Vegas, Portland, and several other locations. SiliconDust did a HDHomerun Quatro 4k Kickstarter, and after an almost comical set of delays including a dock strike and Nick Kelsey hoping for no earthquakes in Southern California, they’ve arrived in backer’s hands (including ours!). And we’ve been busy making sure Project Entangle keeps pace with these developments. Continue reading “Entangle Update Halloween Edition: Spooky Action at a (Social) Distance”