On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 5:00 PM, Torgeir Veimo torgeir@pobox.com wrote:
2009/5/8 Andrew Herron totallymaxed@gmail.com
This is a very popular feature in the Sky+ & SkyHD PVR's from Sky here in the UK as it enables them to offer the ability to rewind 'Live TV' in an ad-hoc way (at least to the point where you switched over to the currently viewed channel) I agree it must put extra wear & stress on the hard drive and yes the energy usage must be higher.
There's no need for this stream to reach disk. A 512MB in memory buffer should be sufficient, and ram is cheap these days.
512MB won't get you far with hdtv. It won't even get you 5 minutes worth. Needless to say, you'd need at least a few GB of dedicated ram to even bother with it. At least ram is cheap now as you've pointed out (especially if you take advantage of MIR's). After seeing how much money I was wasting every month in my electric bill just by not setting a sleep timeout on my harddrives, ram is the only place I'd want any caching like that to take place if I were interested in buffering live tv.