Tag: PVR

Plex moves towards PVR functionality

Article

Thecus N5810PRO Small Business NAS press photo courtesy of Thecus

Plex gets closer to turning a NAS in to a PVR once coupled with a HDHomeRun broadcast-LAN device

IFA 2016: Plex live TV recording comes to Australia | Sydney Morning Herald

From the horse’s mouth

Plex

Product Page

My Comments

Previously I had covered the idea of a NAS being a PVR that records your favourite TV shows. This is whether it works alongside a dedicated USB or broadcast-LAN tuner device or a fully-fledged set-top device.

Recently, Plex was pushed as a “polished” media server for computers or NAS devices. This meant that it could show supplementary information about the movies or music you have on your PC-based media server or NAS if you used client-side apps on your TV or video peripheral.

But this software’s functionality has been extended to include PVR where it can record TV shows off the air and on to your media server or NAS. At the moment, it only works with the HDHomeRun broadcast-LAN TV tuners as its signal source and uses Gracenote as its source for the electronic programme guide. This means that the functionality is offered as part of the PlexPASS subscription program.

It seems to me that this feature could be destined for the servers that run the desktop operating systems but a good question to raise is if the DVR functionality will come about for NAS units because these would appeal more to those of us who run them as a media server. But personally, I would prefer that all of the platforms that Plex Media Server is written for have the upgrade for DVR recording.

To the same extent, it could also be about using a NAS as a “gateway” for a broadcast-LAN device when it comes to viewing live TV content on a tablet, laptop or similar computing device.

At least it is a different approach towards using a NAS and a broadcast-LAN device to perform PVR duties using your home network.

The traditional TV guide is still relevant in the online era

Article

Age Green Guide TV guide on coffee table

What will become of the TV guide that lives on the coffee table?

Why people still read the Radio Times | Brand Republic

My Comments

The above-mentioned article highlights how the traditional printed TV guide is faring in the Internet, blogging and social-media age. These are typically the magazines or newspaper supplements that have the listings for what’s on TV over the up-and-coming week and typically live on the coffee table or near the TV so one can make an informed choice about “what’s on telly tonight”. A few recliner armchairs and sofas even have large pockets sewn in to their sides expressly for the purpose of storing the TV guide magazine. Some viewers even use these magazines and look at the critique offered in them to determine what to record on their PVR systems so they can be sure they aren’t missing the good-quality content.

The example here highlights “Radio Times” which is the quintessential TV-guide magazine of the UK and the first of this class of magazine ever published but I would also see it extend to other respected TV-guide magazines and supplements such as those that are part of good broadsheet newspapers. They have detailed reviews and preview commentaries about the shows that are appearing over the coming weeks, usually with the reviews supplied by film and TV-program critics. This is augmented with columns full of commentary about past shows, the people who are behind them whether as acting talent or directing and artistic talent as well as influences that affect the small screen.

The magazines and newspaper supplements augment some of the big sporting or cultural events shown on TV with their supplementary written and photographic coverage and, in some cases, some of these magazines run the awards ceremonies for the TV industry such as the Emmys in America or the Logies in Australia. A few of them even implemented technologies like Panasonic’s bar codes and the Gemstar VCRPlus/VideoPlus/ShowView/G-Code number-codes as a way to simplify the process of programming a video recorder to record TV shows and partnered with the proponents of these systems to put the feature on the map as far as consumers were concerned.

But how could their role be augmented in the online era? For example, they could work with PVR platforms to supply lists of “critiqued content” or “TV highlights” for users to book for recording on these devices. Similarly, they could implement a TV-friendly Web interface and smart-TV front-end so that users can view the magazine’s treatment of the show they just watched or see slideshows and commentaries provided by these magazines on the TV screen. This could tie-in with video-on-demand offerings so that viewers can see pre-recorded interviews and featurettes about their favourite TV content.

These resources would also be needing to cover content offered on video-on-demand services especially as these services are producing their own original content. This is because the on-demand services are fast becoming a “go-to” service for video content especially as younger people are moving away from traditional scheduled TV content. Set-top platforms like Roku that implement PVR-style cross-service content aggregation can also benefit from “critiqued content” lists provided by TV guides.

Here, the goal is to put the resources that the film critics have built up when curating the content for these magazines and supplements and extend it towards on-demand viewing.

SiliconDust has the idea of the NAS-based PVR for real

Article

WD MyCloud EX2 dual-disk NAS

WD MyCloud EX2 NAS – could be used as part of a network-based DVR

HDHomeRun Kickstarter wants to build the perfect DVR for you | Engadget

From the horse’s mouth

HDHomeRun

HDHomeRun DVR Kickstarter campaign

My Comments

Previously, I touched on the idea of the network-attached-storage becoming a DVR (digital video recorder) or PVR (personal video recorder) device courtesy of various apps being offered to some of these platforms. This is in contrast to set-top PVR devices of the TiVo or Foxtel IQ ilk which are based around their own tuners and hard-disk space.

Now SIliconDust, who make the HDHomeRun broadcast-LAN devices are developing a NAS-based DVR platform based around these devices. They got this idea up off the ground thanks to a highly-publicised Kickstarter crowdfund effort to get the idea up and off the ground.

What the goal is for the HDHomeRun effort is to create a flexible network-centric DVR setup which supports a regular computer or a NAS as the recording device. One of the key advantages is that you can add extra HDHomeRun broadcast-LAN boxes to record an increasing number of shows concurrently. This will earn its keep during the ratings season where the networks run all the good shows at once.

The system will be dependent on a computer, smartphone, tablet, TV or set-top box having a control app to book shows for recording and to play shows that you have recorded, along with a recording app integrated in the server computer or NAS that is doing all of the recording. All the client devices see multiple NAS units with this software as one source rather than as separate sources. It even has the ability to reserve one tuner to handle the common situation where one channel is running good shows one after another during the evening, while properly accommodating padding-out of recordings to deal with channels who overrun their shows to insert more commercials.

Personally, I would like to see this support the functionality associated with VIDIPATH such as having RVU user interfaces along with DLNA playback support, which could also earn its keep with smart TVs. But I see this as a way to bring forward the idea of the ultra-flexible DVR system for the home network.

A network-attached storage could be the next PVR

Those of us who love particular TV shows are enamoured by the personal-video-recorder. They are a follow-on from the video cassette recorder as a tool for recording these shows for later viewing because they use a hard disk rather than tape to hold these shows.

What is the typical PVR nowadays

The TiVo set-top PVR - what we think of this class of device

The TiVo set-top PVR – what we think of this class of device

When we think of a PVR, we typically think of TiVo or a cable-company-supplied device. These are set-top devices with an integrated hard disk and 2 to 4 TV tuners that are connected to a TV antenna (aerial), a satellite-TV dish or cable-TV infrastructure. With these devices, you pick shows to record from an electronic-programme-guide on the TV screen. with the ability to even search for particular shows. Some models even implement a cloud-based Web page for programming shows, operate a recommendation engine and the devices worth their salt can keep recording each episode of a TV serial.

The NAS as a PVR

Synology DiskStation DS415play NAS with media transcoding - Press image courtesy of Synology

Synology DiskStation – one of an increasing number of NAS devices that can become a PVR

A trend that is starting to appear is to equip a network-attached storage server as a PVR, which Synology and a few others are doing as part of their app ecosystem for their NAS devices.

Here, you connect a USB TV-tuner module to the NAS or point it to a broadcast-LAN tuner device of the HDHomeRun ilk to pick up the TV broadcasts. Similarly the NAS could receive streamed or downloaded content from one or more IPTV services without the need for TV-tuner modules. You would typically program the shows using a Web-based interface or mobile / smart-TV app and play these through your TV, computer or mobile device using either DLNA technology or, again, the same mobile / smart-TV app.

These offer a sense of flexibility because you could add on extra tuner devices to “beat the ratings period” where many good shows are being run at once. As well, you have the high-capacity hard disk for recording your shows so there is less of a need to delete shows you have or haven’t watched.

Personally, I would see these devices augmenting a set-top PVR device or work in lieu of one. But there has to be a way to provide a native set-based experience for programming recordings or viewing them, something I would see as being facilitated if UPnP AV 4 which offers remote scheduling, or RVU which offers a “set-based” user interface for other devices is implemented,

Other capabilities that can be opened up include:

  • record all prime-time news bulletins from many channels to allow you to examine how different channels treat particular stories
  • record “like” shows as part of a recommendation engine, including to record previously-curated “critic’s lists” of TV content or recording all shows with particular attributes without tying up a primary PVR’s tuner and disk resources

Similarly, these devices could work well in this respect when the goal is to serve multiple users who want to view the recorded content on different TVs or mobile devices. It could also allow for the design of “lightweight” set-top PVR devices that send broadcast content to a NAS and play content from that NAS rather than recording to a local hard disk. These would have a solid-state storage of a low capacity along with a single tuner for “slip-viewing” content for example or even use a low-capacity hard disk and a tuner to capture content to be stored on a NAS.

Once the concept is well-executed, a high-capacity multiple-disk network-attached storage device could end up serving as a personal video recorder for a household or business.

General-sale digital-TV set-top boxes and DLNA

At the moment, most add-on “over-the-air” digital-TV converter boxes sold through general retail don’t come with UPnP AV / DLNA media-client functionality. But this feature could be offered as something to differentiate units in a product line or differentiate a unit from one offered by a competitor.

There will be a lot of interest in these boxes over the next few years as various countries either switch off analogue TV service and go “all dgital” or enrich their digital-TV platform. This is espeially so as people want to make sure that they can receive the digital TV service on other TVs in their house and at other locations. Integrating the DLNA functionality in these set-top boxes can allow the boxes to become two devces in one – a network media adaptor as well as a digital-TV set-top box.

It will then work with Internet TV / vodcast gateway software that provides DLNA-based directory software for Internet TV services and vodcasts, thus allowing access to this kind of content on the regular TV. The same could hold true for any multimedia content held on a PC or network-attached storage connected to the home network.

Similarly, this concept can work with DLNA-compliant PVR set-top boxes and provide access to content that is recorded on the PVR unit. It can also provide access to “multi-room PVR” functionality like the ability to pause a show in one room and pick up where you left off in another room. Such functionality has been provided for in version 2 of the UPnP AV MediaServer and MediaRenderer device specifications.