Now, in retrospect, a hospital could easily absorb the cost of this
setup, so picture this in a Dorm setting with starving students
wanting this setup. They could still probably get the initial cost of
a couple (say 8-9?) backends that each have 6 pci's full of PVR-500's,
and 2 or 3 rigs that are just file servers (storage). This cost, my
out of the air guess, would be somewhere in the ball park of 2-3
thousand USD. Pulling their money (assuming 100 students) that's only
30 bucks a student. They can probably do that and convince each other
to do it to ensure a 100% commitment (that means that every single
person ponies up the 30 bucks to get this backend running). However,
to then tell them they have to spend more than an additional 20-30
bucks to actually get their content, they won't ever be up to it.
So, total cost I guess would have to somewhere in the ballpark of
5-6k, each student spending a max of 60 dollars total to have this.
I'm sure those starving students each have a PC on their desk - you can't convince them to run linux & myth? :-P
MediaMVP at $75 a pop is a pretty good deal. Another good choice would be xbox, but they are still $100 or so (but much easier to convince students to buy, since they can still be used for games, if modded correctly).
To save money, I think you'll want to either clone some TVs (force two people to share control of one, or have a dead display with no control at all), or have the frontends be portable, and make the TVs that aren't using them watch normal live TV.
I like the idea of the shared frontend. I would think given the right hardware it would be possible for a single computer to house 2 or 3 frontends....more if you can get video cards with tvout that will be happy working together in groups > 2. Controlling the frontends could get complicated...you'd either need a LOT of serial ports (most new PCs have only one, sometimes 2), or some USB ir receivers...and depending on how far apart these TVs are, the cable run for the IR receiver might be too long.
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