That was my first response as well. But then again there are applications that could consume 2.4 Tb/day and it becomes an interesting problem (rather than preserving Fox news for posterity!).
Compression/Compression/Compression! MPEG-4 can maybe give you a factor of 24 if you turn the key frame rate way down. Lossy compression is acceptable since the alternative is Analog tape that is lossy as well. So maybe we can knock it down to 100 GB/day. This becomes almost reasonable and you just need a decent raid system where you can start swapping out drives as they get filled. Of course you can only keep this data for a finite time. If you want it as archival quality, burning to CD/DVD will be another big hardware nightmare. The limitations are going to be the PCI bus and the hard Disk writing speed. Most hard disk systems can't keep streaming even a single DV streatm. This requires multiple hardware paths to alleviate the bottlenice. The transcription to DVD/CD could all be done in parallel off line (maybe a bank of 16 or so DVD writers to keep up? DVD writers have almost gotten to 1X, but heavy compressiion may slow that down) One of the kickers is "professional quality". That may be at least 32 bit data and 2 Mpixel pictures instead of the 24 bit/ 0.3 Mpixel calculation Hamid did. That will overrun any of the savings discussed above. Maybe they should consider "Tape Recorders!". This project needs som serious reality check! -Scott At 2:32 PM -0500 3/1/04, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >This is an amazing request! A person on TV station wants to save 16 Channels 24 hours >a day! > >Don't they have basic Tape recorders in that TV Station? > >Anyhow, if money is not an issue, one can buy 16 PC with tons of Gigabytes hard disks >and then save them, but >just for the fun, let's calculate how many bytes one would need to save one channel >(of video only) >per day > >Let say we have 30 frames per seconds, this will be 2.6 Mframe per day >now if each frame is 24 bits and it is 640x480 pixels (pretty low res though) >then one would need 2,388,787,200,000 bytes per day per channel that means >2388 G byte per day! > >This is a hell of data and it is video only, not sound. > >The answer I guess is the magnetic tape recorder!
