[mythtv-users] commercially-produced mythboxes -- an idea

[Brad Templeton]

On Wed, Jan 12, 2005 at 11:12:29PM -0800, Chris Petersen wrote:
> >A decent HD box is pricey, but not that pricey.  However, typically
> >if you do it cheap you will see:
> 
> Yes, unfortunately, my company can't do it "cheap" -- no special sales, 
> no rebates on parts, and since we really only deal with enterprise-grade 
> stuff like RAM, that tends to cost more than people expect.  Plus, you'd 

A PVR is less needing of "enterprise-grad ram" (whatever that is.  The
main goal is that it not fail.)

If you could build a working xvmc system, it would change the price of
the package.  You would not longer need to buy a modern generation, ie. new,
machine, as I would expect that the prior generation (sub-2ghz) would
do HDTV with xvmc.   Have people with the faster epia systems had them
display hdtv?  Prior-generation hardware is of course often not simply
cheap, but hanging around spare, ie. free.

Hard to escape the need for a big disk.  Though since almost all HDTVs
owned by budget conscious people are no more than 1280x720, you can plan
to transcode down all HDTV to this resolution mp4 -- but then xmvc is out.
I don't have the figures on how much CPU it takes to play 1280x720 mp4.

Of course if you want to sell new boxes, the ability to use older ones
is not an asset.  But it does make it productive to sell a kit, with the
cards, and a hard disk with the software pre-installed and ready to run
after kudzu reconfigures the hardware.  That's one place I would see
a market, folks who would gladly pay an extra $100 rather than hand-build
to one of the many installation instruction sets.

pcHDTV type cards will drop in price of course.  They are actually, in
their way, simpler than hardware encoder cards.   This needs to happen
because the comparable hardware, like hdtivo, has 2 ATSC tuners in it, on
top of the 2 satellite tuners.   A 4-tuner HD-Mythbox is currently a
pretty expensive proposition just for the tuners.