In this chapter we will not repeat the many technical results we have obtained in this project. Rather we will present our main conclusions on how all the partners have gained knowledge through this project, on the total system knowledge we have reached and how we should continue in the future.
At the start of the project, we realized
that the hard disk had to play an important role. Since the HDD's should be used in a
Consumer Electronics (CE) environment rather than in a PC environment and also because the
HDD in the SMASH project should perform other tasks than in a PC application, we had a
major issue here to solve. Moreover we had very little knowledge on IDE/SCSI like
interfacing. Through a lot of work and experimentation we could build an experimental
system which, to our opinion, is the first system where CE and PC technologies have been
merged into one system.
From the PC area we used the HDD and also a Tandberg SCSI tape drive. We used the SCSI
interface as the basic interface to realize the system.
From the CE area we used digital set top boxes for the reception of digital satellite
MPEG-2 programs as well as for the display of the MPEG streams when they are retrieved
from the SMASH system.
As a result of this experimental work, we
have merged not only CE and PC technologies but we also solved some new problems such as
the real time processing and communication of several simultaneous MPEG-2 streams.
This has resulted not only in a storage system with very new features but also in a good
insight in a total storage system chain in the home environment where we start from
digital satellite reception up to the display of MPEG streams on consumer displays.
Besides the MPEG storage at home we worked also on a totally separate application. This was mainly done by our University partner in Ljubljana and it focussed on the need to have course information on line available based on local storage. This opened up the possibility of new ways to structure and use course material. The prototype we developed in the project is demonstrated at many places and we expect that this way of working will be used in the future by other institutes. Also this proved to be a successful cooperation between a university and an industry partner where both profited from the cooperation.
The prototypes we have developed have user interfaces which are suitable for usage by non experts. We have used this to show and experiment with the different possibilities the system offers such as fast search using visual abstracts on the HDD, instant replay of tape programs using buffers on the HDD and many more. The user tests have learned us what are the most important aspects and also the shortcomings the system still has.
So an important conclusion is that, although the current SMASH system already provides many new features, some important aspects are still missing and need further work. We will finish this chapter by explaining what are those areas for future work.
There is still work to be done on several
aspects of the system but we will focus in this chapter on only the two main areas.
The first area is the lack of performance from the existing key components which are
needed in the system. One example are the rather long access times of the used tape drive
in our system. The tape drive we used is however designed as a back up streamer for file
servers or high end works stations. So additional work is needed to develop this
technology more for consumer SMASH applications.
Another very different area is the lack of information for automatic programming of the system. It would be desirable that in the future, the consumer at home can program his recorder in a very different way from the methods used now such as Showview. Preferably he can see on his TV screen an overview of the programs which are going to be broadcast and select a program on his remote control and give a command to record it. After that the recorder can take care when exactly the program should be recorded and from which channel. However at this moment such information is not available from the broadcasters and moreover there is no agreed standard on this in Europe. Work has to be done to improve this situation.