24/7 Recording - I want to record EVERYTHING, then later pick which bits to keep.

[johnsonx42]

ed - Does it still count as "commercial purposes" when it's being used solely within a public school library and not being used to make any profit whatsoever?

you'd have to ask sub directly about that. However, profit is not the only issue that defines commercial use.

[bgowland]

The reason behind it all is that I work for an academic library and have staff ask "did you record [..] last night?".

At which point you reply "Nope, did you ask me to?"

This way I can just go back in time and extract it without having to predict requests in advance.

Of the past 30 years of my working life I spent 20 of them in academia and the AV departments had fixed systems for academics to request recording TV and Radio programmes for teaching purposes (in advance of the broadcast). None of the AV techs I met were ever capable of mind-reading so it seems fair if they didn't record something then they weren't to blame if a particular academic hadn't put in the request.

There is an existing system we could get that does exactly as I describe.. for several thousand dollars.

Has it occurred to you how much a PC with all of the tuners and disk space plus processing power to transcode / process /classify all of the programmes broadcast 24/7 on multiple channels will cost?

Aside from the licensing issues for NextPVR mentioned by others, I'm not sure you really understand what would be needed to achieve what you're proposing regardless of software used.

[Brenden]

Has it occurred to you how much a PC with all of the tuners and disk space plus processing power to transcode / process /classify all of the programmes broadcast 24/7 on multiple channels will cost?

This is a joint investigation with our IT department, I'm not just some librarian blindly listing his dreams, but thanks for the heads up.

[johnsonx42]

while it's a moot point since npvr isn't licensed for this usage, I don't really think the computer would have to be all that amazing. I know many people here routinely record 4 to 6 streams at once on fairly vanilla hardware... my lowly box has recorded 4 shows simultaneously while watching a 5th channel live, running comskip on 2 of the 4 recordings, no problem. all npvr does is take the data stream from the broadcaster and write it to the disk. there'd be no need to transcode everything either; one would only transcode the shows that need to be written to DVD or whatever.

and of course the storage itself is CHEAP. I've got a store nearby offering 2TB drives for $60.