MGoVault Project
tldr; looking for people with engin./technical backgrounds who live in Pac12/Big12/SEC/ACC cities, that would be willing to record games from the respective conferences, and upload to a centralized repository.
Hello! I'm looking to form a team that will build upon the success of other projects which have captured and distributed Michigan Football/Basketball video. Specifically, I'm looking for people who meet a few of the following criteria:
- You live outside the B1G geographic footsprint.
- You have a cable service provider that supports TiVos/M-cards.
- You're an engineer/have a technical background that involves building/servicing computer hardware and software. Or, you're self taught and aren't afraid to open up your computer/other electronics and find out how they work.
- You've used bittorrent and know how to create and seed a torrent.
What we're looking to do is capture as many out of conference games as possible. By controlling the quality and breadth of captured video, we are giving the Michigan football/basketball community unparalleled 'raw material' to scout future opponents and peform in-depth research.
I've modified a piece of computer hardware to do this, so recordings are much higher quality than what's capable with a Hauppauge HD-PVR (exploits the analog loophole).
Here's a brief Q&A that will answer a lot of the questions that may pop-up:
- Q: Wouldn't this be illegal?
- A: Yes. However, as long as Tor and VPN services that can paid with via bitcoin exist...Oh, and good luck trying to export stuff out of ESPN3 and performing frame accurate editing of the content.
- Q: Ok, I might be interested..What equipment will I need?
- A: You'd be sent a modified/upgraded DVR with 2TB (not a typo) of capacity. That means you can also return the cable company rented DVR, so you'd be saving $10/month, potentially.
- Q: What about TenYardTorrents/other sources that already post torrents of NCAA games?
- A: Most of it is lower quality .mp4's/other video that can't be frame accurate edited.
- Q: What is frame accurate editing and why is it important?
- A: Say I wanted to build a ruby on rails on rails/webapp that called out a specific video sequence (1Hr::47min::13s through 1Hr::47min::46s) and embed this video in a page, and be able to advance the video frame by frame (720p broadcasts on ABC/ESPN film at 60fps). MP4's simply don't have the B/I-frames to do that. This is why getting source material is important.
- Q: Ok, I'm interested.
- A: Great! Contact me via email. 'mgovault at gmail dot com'
/s
That last one wasn't a question.
How is it "better quality" than what comes out of a digital tuner? Aren't broadcasts MPEG2? How do you get better quality than what's encoded? Sounds fishy.
Doubtful. The fact that this person signed up yesterday and has 500+ points (and no posting history) means he's probably been in contact with Brian and/or the mods, and they've verified his veracity. Similar to what they've done with Tay Odoms and Vincent Smith.
Other plausible explanations:
- He IS Brian or one of the mods.
- He's a hacker, and we're about to experience a site meltdown.
when it hits the M-Card, it's still digital, yes. But the Hauppauge HD PVR is recording the analog signal that come out of the component cables that carry the HD signal. It's...a sloppy implementation. I'm pretty sure they have a broadcom chip that does on the fly H.264 encoding, but keep in mind you're losing I-Frames and B-Frames during the encoding process, which are essentially for frame accurate advances.
It's like recording audio from line-in. You lose the metadata that you'd otherwise have if you stuck it in the DVD drive in your computer.
*Edit - I realized I phrased the OP poorly with respect to 'better'. The implementation I'm using for capture is better than what the Hauppauge unit is capable of.
So you're not recording, say, with a cablecard tuner in a computer, but from your cable company's provided box then to analog, then to digital? Is that to bypass copy protection?
what if the CCI broadcast flag is ignored?
- Q: Wouldn't this be illegal?
- A: Yes. However, as long as Tor and VPN services that can paid with via bitcoin exist...Oh, and good luck trying to export stuff out of ESPN3 and performing frame accurate editing of the content.
This is not a complete thought or something is wrong with the sentence structure. I have no idea what you're trying to say. It's kind of hard to say "sure, I'll do something illegal" without comprehending that however sentence....
proper usage and application of those services/technologies allow interesting...possibilities.
Google 'Silk Road and Bitcoin' for more information.
Feds seize money from Dwolla account belonging to top Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/05/feds-seize-money-from-top-bi…
Tor basically makes all internet traffic go through several layers of different computers so that the traffic can't be tracked back to you. VPN services are those which setup a computer for you to connect to, generally in a different country, so that you do the seeding from that computer instead of your own and the traffic can't be tracked back to you. Bitcoin is an anonymous way of paying.
All of these technologies are legal and provide anonymity. However, because of the anonymity, these services provide an easy way to tread into some illegal or legally grey areas without getting into trouble.
I am fairly young and I have no fucking idea what is going on right now.
Why is MGoBlog so scary?
Sounds like a really interesting concept. Storage seems like it would be a problem though. Out of curiousity how do you intend to store all of this content?
I've got about 10TB of free space on a ZFS NAS I've built.
We'd probably use Glacier (http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/) for long term storage.
glacier would be used for long term storage, once the 10TB NAS is filled. They'd have to know what they're looking for via file checksum because the filenames would be random on glacier and they aren't publically facing. Only the person who has the AWS credentials would have access to it.
honestly, if we fill 10TB, I'll probably build another 10TB NAS. If we hit north of 10TB, that means the project was a resounding success beyond my wildest expectations, and I wouldnt have a problem shelling out a few bucks out of my wallet (heh, come to think of it, I'm kind of bankrolling the whole thing already)
if the NFL/NCAA won't give a fans a way to educate themselves on how the game is being played and perform independent analysis (http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/01/what-the-nfl-wont-show-you/252240/) then we will build it ourselves.