Saturday, August 03, 2002

The Desktop Computer as Live-TV Recorder [New York Times: Technology]  Ok I haven't posted a news item in a long time so here's one.  I was just thinking of doing something like this with my cable modem.  Only why not pipe ALL the content over the net instead of making me hook up another cable on the back of my PC.  With 5 USB devices plus a host of others hooked up it's getting a little crowded in that area.  I mean with the 2 mbps of bandwith I'm pulling right now I could easily watch broadcast quality tv and have bandwith to spare....and with dropping a lot of the tv signal from the fiber wires you could allow people more bandwith, say 10-15 mbps.  Now I know you're gonna say but I don't want to watch TV on my monitor.  You don't have to.  That's where a simple ATI card comes in with Component out.  I mean why spend all this time building new infrastructure and intelligence into set-top boxes when you have a PC sitting right there.  Even mid-grade PC's these days come with well over a gig chip in them.  From experience there is no need for that much speed.  Machines come with either 256 or 512 megs of RAM and HD's over 100 gigabytes.  On top of that they plan to release 400 GigaByte HD's by the end of next year.  Now that's a lot of unused resources sitting in that little beige box.  There's so much we could with computers if people would just stop thinking of how to protect our precious TV. comment [] 4:36:32 PM

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