This one time, at band camp, Rick Welykochy wrote: > Out of curiosity, how does the price of an SD or HD > do it yourself pvr-style setup, e.g. MythTV or other, > compare to paying for a pvr from Topfield or Beyonwiz? > > SD Topfield ... approx $700.00, with 200 GB HDD > > HD Beyonwiz ... approx $1200.00, with 320 GB HDD > > I've had an SD toppy for, oh, four years now. Only hiccup > was a damaged IR pickup which was repaired under warranty. > Live TV? What is that?
There's some fairly major functional differences, which I'll describe below. But how about this for my costs: IBM server from eBay: $50 2X 500GB SATA drives: $280 Diskless, fanless Via EPIA front-end: $400 So comparable to the Topfield, except that the bit in my lounge room is completely silent, and I have five times the storage. > The only downside to the two PVRs I have played with: their > software is riddled with bugs. Not show stoppers, but real > annoying little gnats that have insane workarounds. These > machines are software heavy but ... sigh. Whereas MythTV is pretty damn solid, and improving all the time. The vendors of these commercial PVRs don't have much incentive to help you maintain your existing system, since they've already made their money. So onto those functional differences: * Ability to separate backend and frontend (silence in the lounge room) * Commercial flagging * Upgrade to HD requires only a new frontend * Upgrading storage or adding tuners is trivial * Ability to schedule programmes with a web browser, anywhere * No vendor to go broke, stranding you with an out-of-date-system I'm about to move to HD myself. Just waiting on delivery of my new telly and PS3. -- Rev Simon Rumble <si...@rumble.net> www.rumble.net The Tourist Engineer Nerds need vacations too. http://engineer.openguides.org/ "Impact: Non-privileged primitive users can cause the total destruction of your entire invasion fleet and gain unauthorized access to files." - CERT Advisory CA-96.13 - Alien/OS Vulnerability -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
