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 be surprised at how easy it is to get parts below wholesale cost from places like newegg (due to some nifty tricks in volume purchasing), which we wouldn't be able to pull off unless machines were selling like crazy (which I don't expect them to).
We'd also run into supply issues if we started trying to push older hardware like my beloved asus pundit. I need to talk with people at work to figure out what's going on with cpu's -- all I know is that intel is going to be killing off the socket 478 stuff, which leads me to believe that AMD will be doing the same with their equivalent line of athlons. Which means no old/cheap processors.
This is all turning into something a lot more complex than I originally intended. Things have been a bit hectic at work lately, so I'm going to put things on hold for awhile until I can sit down with someone who understands the supply chain and future availability of things like cpu's (I'm just the coder, not a sales guy).
Then there's the whole broadcast flag issue with the hdtv stuff. I don't think anyone really knows what's going to happen to the linux hdtv market come June.
Your off-list email from earlier today has given me a lot to think about for the market segment, too, as well as about knopmyth (which I admitedly don't know much about).
Like you said, optimally, there should be an offering of different servers.. sd, sd+hd, hd, and frontend-only. Not necessarily different machines (although it'd be sweet to be able to offer a $300-ish diskless frontend-only box), since most of that can be handled through configuration options, but a lot of options to consider.
-Chris _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
