SnapStream Blog

In the recent weeks, we’ve been dealing with an increased amount of user traffic on our guide data servers. This has meant slower guide data download times during peak hours for some users. The servers providing the data up to this point were in no way underpowered (dual processor Xeon, 4gb ram, 10k rpm SCSI drives, ect), but just weren’t up to the task.

So we went shopping!

The requirements were simple: Pack enough horsepower into a 1u (that’s geek speak for really small) chassis to fix the problem and provide scalability for the future….. without breaking the bank.

We looked into HP, Gateway, Dell and Custom Built solutions, comparing the price and feature sets available at each level. In the end, the brand new Dell 1950 chassis was exactly what we were looking for.

Given Dell’s crazy pricing schemes and freebies, we were able to secure a Xeon, Dual Core, Dual Processor, HyperThreaded, 3.0ghz box with dual 146gb 10k rpm drives across a Perc 5/i controller without going over budget. If you know servers, then you get the picture. If you don’t know servers, then suffice it to say that this box is Honkin!

Gratuitous Server Shots:

We put Wolverine into service this morning without too much trouble. Knock on wood…. when you get guide data tonight, it should be from the new box.

What’s next?

Well, on top of a processor shortage for the guide data, we also need a little bit of extra drive space to house a few things.

Juggernaut will be born next week. Evil Laugh.
Keep in mind, the drives shown in the picture will only fill 1/4 of the hot swap bays of the new machine. Another Evil Laugh.
Here’s a teaser of some of it’s parts (yes, those are 500gb drives):

When I first built my HTPC three years ago with a 40GB hard drive, I thought that I was doing pretty good. Analog recordings are a manageable size, and I could always ShowSqueeze them from MPEG2 to WMV each night. I could easily store a couple weeks’ new releases and still hold onto a ten-show deep archive of Seinfeld episodes without ever feeling a pinch.

But last November everything changed when we released Beyond TV 4, and I brought home my first HDTV tuner card. Suddenly, I was measuring show sizes in gigabytes instead of megabytes. My Seinfeld archive was obliterated. I could barely hold onto a week’s worth of content before it would start disappearing. I had a serious case of hard disk envy.

Today, Beyond TV 4.3 delivers more TV to my HTPC. Beyond TV now supports ShowSqueeze for HDTV recordings! I can take massive ATSC transport streams and ShowSqueeze them down to a very manageable DivX or Windows Media format files. Beyond TV 4.3 also strips out the extra sub-channel information so recordings are already up to 50% smaller.

Beyond TV 4.3 is also the first DVR to support DivX 6.1 which incorporates Intel optimizations that can result in up to 300% faster encoding and even smaller file sizes. All of this, along with under-the-hood improvements to fight disk fragmentation, and I can hold onto more high quality TV than ever before.

Of course all this new storage space begs the question… what am I going to record? I’ve already seen every episode of Seinfeld multiple times, so it’s probably time to start branching out. Beyond TV 4.3 also helps with finding new shows to record with our newly launched Beyond TV Buzz (http://www.snapstream.net/buzz.aspx). We’re slowly building a “social DVR experience” into Beyond TV, and Beyond TV Buzz is our first small step towards that. Beyond TV users that opt-in will automatically have their recording data counted in the community statistics. The “Top Recorded Episodes” lists the top 15 episodes recorded in the previous week. You can also expand the list to the top 100 episodes to grab onto the “long tail” of TV. The “Top Upcoming Recordings” is particularly helpful because it provides day-by-day recommendations from the community before the shows actually air. So you never have to feel left out again.

Of course, in addition to delivering more TV than ever before, Beyond TV 4.3 also brings a list of other enhancements and fixes. We’ve added support for the newly released ATI Theater 650 chipset – the first tuner card to combine ATSC/HDTV with hardware encoding for analog TV onto a single chip. We’ve also made SmartSkip for HDTV a whole lot faster. You can check out the full buzz by visiting these links:

Beyond TV 4.3 Release Notes
Beyond TV 4.3 Update for Beyond TV 4 Users
Beyond TV 4.3 Trial for new users
Beyond TV Buzz
Press Release: SnapStream Announces Added Support for DivX 6.1
Press Release: SnapStream Media Launces Beyond TV 4.3