[mythtv-users] It's not the TiVo that she loved...
Sam Varshavchik
mrsam at courier-mta.com
Wed Apr 5 22:56:36 UTC 2006
Jesse Guardiani writes:
> hear hear. MythTV only makes sense as a hobby or if you need the added
> functionality/disk space.
> Tivo is cheaper (and probably easier to use and possibly more reliable)
> by far. I suspect that might
> change as time marches on though.
Tivo is about to drop lifetime subscriptions.
I bought a series 1 very soon after it came out, and paid $200 for a
lifetime subscription. About a year after series 2 came out, Tivo made an
offer to their existing customers to transfer their series 1 subscription,
if they buy a series 2 at a regular price. I took them up on their offer,
and I'm still on my lifetime subscription.
I forget how many years rolled by, in the meantime; someone else who's more
of a Tivo fan can figure out if I did better, or worse, than if I were to
pay the monthly fee. I'm pretty sure I'm way ahead of the game, it's gotta
be at least 5 years, now. 200/5/12=$3 a month, and dropping.
So, when my current series 2 box eventually croaks, I would have to look
forward to paying $13/month from that point on -- and that was why I began
hacking mythtv. And I hope to finish hacking, before my Tivo finally
croaks.
I can certainly understand Tivo's motivations -- they must have a large
number of people on a lifetime subscription, who are not generating any
revenue for them, meanwhile they have to pay a non-zero cost, per
subscriber, for dialup access and for the TV listings. I would guess that
their original business plan was to at least break even on their lifetime
subscribers through advertising (which is why I wasn't bitching when Tivo
begin pushing ads into the main menu), but I guess it's not working out…
The way I see it: a standalone box is certainly more expensive, but if
you put together a high-end server, and use an MPEG encoder card with
MythTV, the your real extra out-of-pocket expense is really just the encoder
card. With an encoder card, MythTV's extra load is light, and you should be
able to use the box like any other workstation/server. mythfilldatabase
would probably generate more load then recording a single TV stream.
I picked up a Hauppauge PVR-350 for $145. That's the extra cost, as far as
I'm concerned. Maybe later down the road I'll splurge for an IR
transmitter, to drive the cable box; for now I'm just using the card's
tuner.
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