Three years ago --when SMASH started-- digital satellite broadcast just started, digital terrestrial broadcast was just a dream, hardware (MPEG decoders) were expensive and digital storage for consumers was not available. Now three years later, the situation in Europe has changed drastically.
At the start of the
SMASH project we had the following vision and ideas: in the future (which happens to
become true very fast now) most information will enter the home in a digital way and it
will be required that the user at home can store and retrieve this information in an easy
and cost effective way.
Therefore several new techniques had to be developed in the area of mass storage and
retrieval technologies. We had the idea that the mass storage concept is best realized by
the combination of a digital tape drive (DTD) and a hard disk
drive (HDD). This concept should exploit the advantages of both components and hide
their drawbacks.
Our vision that much information will become available digitally has become true in two areas: the massive use of MPEG-2 for digital satellite services and the internet for the WEB information. On the storage technology front, both affordable HDD's and consumer DTD's are becoming available and therefore the project has been well timed.
To remain focussed on
the applications and user benefits we have selected early on three application areas, each
one quite different from the other but all three characterized by their need for a HDD-DTD
combination. The first and most interesting one has been the recording and retrieval of
MPEG-2 video received by a satellite dish. We call this application the DVB-VCR.
The second one is a new concept of personal education where the student has (almost) all
material which is relevant for a course on one tape.
"The last one is a storage application for Internet services. At this moment internet
storage is not such an issue because most people are connected with low speed modems. This
will change very much in the future with the arrival of cable modems.
For all three applications a working prototype has been realized with very attractive user
features. More details on those can be found in chapter 4.3.
But to be able to
realize all this, several new technologies had to be developed. First of all we had to
realize a system which is able to receive MPEG streams in real time from a Set Top Box,
buffer those temporarily on the HDD and transfer them to the tape drive. Real time
performance proved to be very challenging. Moreover we had to use a tape drive which was
not really designed for this purpose.
Secondly we had to develop new techniques for fast search and retrieval because this
becomes far more difficult when using MPEG. This has been achieved by storing program
abstracts on the HDD so that retrieval can be done very fast.
Thirdly we have developed techniques for watermarking the MPEG streams as an aid for copy
protection.
A last issue we had to tackle was an agreed and common interface between the SMASH storage
unit, consisting of the HDD and DTD, and the three application units. All those
achievements are described in more detail in chapter 4.2.
For the reader of this report to obtain a fast insight in the total system we have written
chapter 4.1 in which we explain also the main new features which are possible with a
HDD-DTD combination.
The project has reached its final goal, which was to demonstrate the concept for the three applications. The technologies we have developed can now be used for real product implementations. Also the prototypes we have can and will be used for further user evaluation. Many new insights have been obtained and especially the total system knowledge we have built up is of large importance. It is foreseen that the partners in the future will either continue to further develop the technologies or to start product development based on the current results obtained.