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First Look: Didja’s Local TV Streaming Service

One of the interesting things about being in the Silicon Valley is that startups are popping up all around you. Earlier this week I came across Didja, a startup providing a free service that streams local broadcast television, similar to Sling TV or DIRECTVNow. It includes a cloud DVR that allows you to record about 300 hours of shows.

Didja is based in Mountain View, California. As it turns out, they’re half a mile down the street from me and in a building that used to house one of my former clients!  Well, with such an auspicious location I had to see what it was all about. Continue reading “First Look: Didja’s Local TV Streaming Service”

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Review: The SiliconDust HDHomerun Connect Quatro!

April 7, 2018: Please take a look at the follow-up to this review.

Koherence’s projects have long been powered by SiliconDust HDHomerun tuners. At present 13 HDHR4s are feeding the three production Entangles, and a venerable HDHR Rev 2 handles other sundry tasks. The RF and power supply cabling has started to become quite…entangling…so the announcement of the four-tuner HDHomerun Connect Quatro was received with much anticipation. As soon as a (not quite local) Best Buy got it in stock, I was off to get one for evaluation! Continue reading “Review: The SiliconDust HDHomerun Connect Quatro!”

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The Project Entangle Wishlist (i.e. why write a DVR?)

So I’ve been getting this question a lot over the past several months: Why Project Entangle? Why would I go about writing a DVR?

On the surface it’s easy to think I’m crazy (in addition to being inkoherent). After all, there’s the Tablo OTA DVR (in fact I’ve had one since the Indiegogo days, although it’s been gathering dust for a couple years). Plex has added DVR support. And the fine folk at SiliconDust now have a DVR for their HDHomerun devices too. And there’s TiVo. Having been affiliated with them for close to two decades, I have a variety of them from Series2s to Roamios. Continue reading “The Project Entangle Wishlist (i.e. why write a DVR?)”

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Speeding Up Slow Sums – Faster BSD Checksums

I recently made some changes to the Entangle archive that required a good majority of the archive to be checksum reverified. That’s about 200 TB worth of checksums. Even with six systems running parallel, and RAIDs hitting 600 MB/s, it still takes a while.

One thing I noticed was that the I/O rate while the sums were being performed was ~210 MB/s. A respectable speed, but cp’ing a file from the RAID to to /dev/null results in ~600 MB/s. So either my CPU was too slow or the ‘sum’ operation wasn’t as efficient as it could be. Continue reading “Speeding Up Slow Sums – Faster BSD Checksums”

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Project Entangle

Project Entangle is Koherence’s internal platform for developing various media technologies. It began as a test bed for investigating how TiVo-style trick modes could be implemented using HTTP Live Streaming. Since then Project Entangle has blossomed into a collection of platforms.

The Entangle DVR platform supporting in-home and out-of-home playback is currently being alpha tested, with users watching shows on iPhones, iPads and AppleTVs. Another platform variant powers the SFBayATSC ATSC broadcast monitoring system. Continue reading “Project Entangle”