[mythtv-users] Cost of MythTV Machines

[Tony Brummett]

On 1/22/06, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:
> With some recent discussion here about CPUs and costs I wonder what
> the "average" cost of a MythTV machine might be.

I doubt you'd be able to boil it down to any single "average" number,
because there's so much variation about what a MythTV machine does. 
For example, my first MythTV box cost me less than $200.  I used a
900MHz PC I scavanged from work and an old bttv capture card I got on
extended loan from a friend, and just had to buy a large hard drive to
store things on, and an el-cheapo Nvidia video card with TV-out.

My current setup was only a little more expensive.  I have 2 frontend
machines: the same one above, and another I put together from parts I
had laying around (cost: about $30 for another Nvidia card).  The
backend I bought all new parts for (1.5GHz AMD, a PVR-250, 2 80G hard
drives, cheap case).  It was, maybe, $500 three or four years ago. 
Pretty much any machine you can throw together today is going to be
fast enough for standard-def TV.

I'm currently putting together an all new frontend that can playback
HD, plus a tuner and more hard drives for the backend.  It'll probably
all be $900 to $1000 because I'm going to be splurging on a nice case
that'll fit with the other stereo components, and make everything
super quiet.  I'm probably overspending on a few things, but I'm
hoping it's fast enough that I won't have to do this again any time
soon.

-- Tony