nick.recoil.org

A chap at Smoke and Mirrors, where I’m doing some Freelance work, is creating a system to bridge between video routers and a web-based status page. Most of the suites within the building are plumbed in via fibre-optic KVM connections, and depending on the schedule, different video processing systems can get presented in different rooms at different times. All it takes is a change on the routers.

Although complex, this enables the most cost-effective use of each system, marrying the functionality needed to the number of physical people required to attend the session for any given day. There is a large variation in price and functionality with certain high-end systems, so you always want to try and get maximal use from the systems you have chosen to invest in.

He’s looking at using one of the boards from the wonderfully named Acme Systems from Rome. The idea is to communicate with the video router via its RS-232 serial interface, and retrieve an ASCII representation of the current router configuration. It’s a fascinating area of software AND hardware as glue. A physical device which will run some bespoke code to bridge information from one system into another.

In related news, I’ve also received my Artigo Pico-ITX kit and am now a proud owner of the tiniest system running Linux that I’ve ever seen. It also seems to play happily with the DVB sticks that I had stability issues with on the older Mini-ITX M10k board.

The fan is noticable in a very quiet room, but as soon as there’s anything else to be heard, it’s drowned out, so it’s not quite suitable for your bedroom. They do a fanless system, but it’s half the clock speed. Installing it was done over PXE from my Mac, using the Ubuntu netboot downloads.

Certain channels exist on Freeview which are nothing but timeshifted content from another channel. By convention, these have been called plus 1 channels, so ITV2+1 is a channel devoted to showing exactly what is on ITV2, delayed by one hour….except it doesn’t.

The image above was shown last night between roughly 10 and 12pm, during the time when ITV2 was showing Beverly Hills Cop II. Now I would think this is because ITV2 has paid for a particular number of showings during a given time period, and technically speaking, ITV2+1 broadcasting it would constitute as another showing, and that would push it over that figure. This might also be related to whether or not the content had been shown on ITV1 before ITV2, as is often the case.

This is, of course, a ridiculous waste of precious terrestrial bandwidth, and I wonder just how profitable it is for these +1 channels to be maintained. The usual way people would arrive at watching content on a +1 channel is if they’ve seen something on the non-timeshifted channel, and would like to see it from the beginning. This means the programme would have to be at least 1 hour long to begin with, and be sufficiently compelling to make people bother to find the +1 version of the channel.

These channels are also rendered useless when the viewer has a set-top box with a hard disk, and the box records the content they are interested in.

Last but not least, why not timeshift ITV1, which appeals to a larger audience? Perhaps there would be even less actual content for an ITV1+1 due to these rights restrictions. It would all depend on how much content is bought, and on what terms. Having said that, ITV1 is billed as “Top viewing”, whereas ITV2 is billed as “Top US shows”, according to the ITV website, which would suggest ITV2 has more bought content.

I also think messages like the one above reduce the amount of trust the viewer has in a +1 channel. If they find something they would like to view from the beginning, but they’ve previously been denied the chance because of those legal reasons, they might not return in the future. This is exacerbated by the fact that no information is given to the viewer to suggest why the content can’t be shown, and it is left to them to puzzle it out.