<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Bobby Gill <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:bobbygill@rogers.com">bobbygill@rogers.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
I am curious what the total cost is/was for you to get everything up and running (asides from time, which depending on whom you are may be the priciest...).<br><br>So for example, an HD capture card, a capable backend, the frontend(s) of course, the subscription to a provider and/or an antenna-- and if an antenna, did you do it yourself? Order it online, buy from a shop, hire someone to install, etc.? Not necessarily asking for the life story but some brief explanation of the components as I'm really trying to get a gauge on what entering this arena may cost me, and whether it's /worth/ it or not...<br>
</blockquote></div><br><br><br>If I were to do it now, I'd make the frontends with Aspire Revo boxes $200/ea. The backend can be somewhat slow if you don't want to do commflagging or transcoding, but assume you want to do those and get a good server box. Those $75 servers the other poster is selling would make a nice backend box with an SATA card and a couple HDDs. Then you need a tuner or capture card. I went with the HDHomerun and an antenna. The Antenna was purchased online from <a href="http://solidsignal.com">solidsignal.com</a>. I used a DB4, and installed it myself. I get excellent signal for OTA HD channels. I believe the antenna cost me about $50. <br>
<br>If you want to supplement with online sources that are flash based like Hulu, you need more CPU in the frontend boxes. You can build uATX based machine with a pretty fast dual-core AMD for not much more than the $200 for the Revos if you want that. If you can find sources of h264 or MPEG2 video without Flash, the Revos will work fine. It's Flash that sucks, not the videos themselves. If Adobe would implement VDPAU, this would be a non-issue. <br>