When I visited BBC R&D labs last year after EuroOSCON, I saw an absolutely astonishing system. Macro is a few PCs with video capture cards recording a pile of domestic British channels and storing the encoded files for later playback. Tom Loosemore talked about this today at XTech so at long last the cat’s out of the bag and I can talk about it. You can see it in operation here but actual show downloads are password-protected (and you can’t get a password, for obvious reasons).
Macro is gorgeous. It consumes the BBC’s electronic program guide to determine when shows begin and end, who’s in them, etc. There was a way sexy PHP interface (written, I think, by the fantastic Phil Gyford) to the archived programs that let you subscribe to shows, actors, keywords, etc. (I don’t recognize the current UI, so I think the cool social software is still inside the R&D firewall). It’s social software, so you can see what your friends are watching, your friends can recommend shows, and shows can simply bubble up to your attention because a lot of your friends are watching them. When I saw it I immediately thought, “this is the way my TiVo should be.”
Because there are so few interesting channels, this is the sort of system that it’s perfectly possible for civilians like you and me to build. They use one machine per channel, relying on approximately 1GHz boxes. The on-the-fly capturing and encoding uses open source software. The video pipeline is built using Kamaelia, a BBC open source project that’s a Python distributed pipeline system. If a dozen of us got together, each bought one PC, and installed them in a machine room, we could record all the channels we need (e.g., NBC, CBS, ABC, UPN (I gots to have my Veronica Mars), CNN, Fox, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, HBO, ESPN, PBS, and BBC America for maximum amusement value).
The best part of Macro is that it is all legal. It’s just time-shifting, a protected fair use.
And because (apparently) talking about the conferences I’m organizing is a nervous tic for me, I have to say it: I was so excited by the promise of Macro (or “BBC Archive Testbed” as it was then known) that I’ve asked them to speak on the subject at this year’s EuroOSCON.