SnapStream Blog

Call me cheap, but I tend to use Beyond TV to save money… like by ditching cable tv or by recompressing shows to my iPhone instead of buying them on the iTunes store .

So here we go again, this time I take on the “boxed set dvd” release of a tv show that just aired.
There are two main problems with boxed sets as I see it.

1. They are expensive.
2. They aren’t guaranteed to be release at any specific time (or at all)

Hand made DVD sets from last season

The start of the Fall TV Season is a great time to start building a collection of your favorite shows. Or maybe you don’t know what your favorites will be, so just record everything.

My Beyond TV rig for this project is a Core 2 duo machine with with 10 tuners and 2TB of space (by way of 4 x 500gb drives).

Back of the Beyond TV 10 Tuner System

The 500GB disks are simply plugged in to the onboard sata controller, no raid or other setup. Beyond TV makes turning the chunks of space on each disk into something usable through drive pooling.
Folder Management Settings in Beyond TV

So what does that mean for keeping all of the new shows on tv?

Well, lets do a little estimation. Lets say….

• There are 26 new episodes of each show in a year (half in the fall, half in the winter).
• And there are 5 major channels that display a total of 13 hours of primetime a night (where the 3 majors have 3 hours a night and fox and cw have 2 hours a night).
• At 7 nights a week that brings us to ((26 x 13 x 7) / 2) or 1183 hours per season (fall and winter).

Stay with me here…

Using the “Better” h.264 ShowSqueeze profile on this machine, I can showsqueeze 1 hour of video down to ~650mb.
Convienently enough, I can fit all of my fall season tv recorindgs in 770GB and still have 1.3TB free for other recordings.

Now for the fun part…..

That just happens to work for what we’re trying to do here. Assuming that we want to record the first half of the season and then burn, it means we can fit 13 episodes of a 30 minute show on one single layer DVD or 13 episodes of an hour long show on a dual layer disk. Perfect!

One of “the office” disks

Of course, this is the extreme example. If you only watch 5-7 episodic series a season (like a normal person), then you really don’t need a ton of space to do this project yourself.
However, it is cool to list this many shows to record.

List of some of the recordings from this machine

Now all we have to do is wait for December to roll around. Once we’re ready, we can burn all of our h.264 recordings to a data dvd inside of Beyond TV.

One Additional benefit of this method is you can have a DVD of shows that got canceled. I personally keep the dvd’s I made of “Committed” and all 4 Episodes of “Skin” (both of which were canceled before their time).

So let’s recap:
1. Get enough storage to fit 13 episodes (the fall season) of the shows you want to keep. (Adding a drive and using drive pooling in Beyond TV is an easy way to do this.)
2. Set Showsqueeze to “Better” h.264 quality for these shows.
3. Wait for shows to record and compress.
4. Burn episodes to “data” dvd using Beyond TV’s dvd burning.
5. Save ridiculous amounts of money since you are making $40 box sets for yourself.

I’ll do a follow-up post to this in a few months. Hopefully by then I can show off a super huge library.

About the Author:

Zack Price, a long time member of the SnapStream engineering team, is a notoriously cheap geek. He’s recently described how to ditch cable and move to over the air HD. When not at SnapStream, Zack enjoys time at home with his wife Candice, dog Watson, cat Mittens (whose breath smells like cat food) and two iPhones.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 11th, 2007 at 1:52 pm by zack and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.