[mythtv-users] Sell mythtv "set-top" boxes

[Ray Olszewski]

I suspect the realities of providing support will confound an idea of this 
sort.

The first part is hardware. Do you stand behind it or not? Granted, bad 
components are comparatively rare these days ... but in the past 2 years, 
I've encountered a defective motherboard (bad IDE controller), 2 bad AverTV 
cards, a bad Linksys NIC, and bad RAM. And that's in a setting where I 
build about a half dozen machines per year. (All replaced under warranty, 
BTW, except the Aver cards, since Aver won't accept warranty claims based 
on Linux failures.)

If you try to charge your customers $25 per hour to replace bad components 
you supplied to them, I strongly suspect you won't be in business for very 
long. And in a Myth setting, diagnosing hardware problems can be tricky and 
time consuming, since Myth seems to fail in uninformative ways when the 
problem is, as was in the case of the AverTV problems, at the level of the 
bttv driver.

Second, as to cost, your calculation was:

At 03:09 AM 5/15/2003 -0700, Kevin hjelden wrote:
>Would it really cost this much wholesale? From newegg.com:
>
>Core (Intel):
>$58 micro-ATX motherboard w/ onboard sound, video, lan (N82E16813141103)
>$55 1.7Ghz celeron (N82E16819112169)
>= $113
>
>Core (AMD):
>$47 micro-ATX motherboard w/ onboard sound, video, lan (N82E16813138201)
>$61 Athlon XP 1800+ retail (N82E16819103353)
>= $108
>
>Components:
>$18 RAM: 128mb DDR PC2100 (N82E16820150522)
>$114 WD 120g hard drive (N82E16822144107)
>$39 XFX GeForce2 MX400 w/ composite and svideo (N82E16814150019)
>$45 ATI Radeon VE (N82E16815116304)
>~$30 Case
>~$20 IR blaster/receiver
>=  $266
>
>Total: ~$400 (with shipping)

OK. The only thing I quarrel with here is using 128 MB of RAM. 256 MB 
provides better performance, in my exierience (more gbuffer room, mainly). 
Oh, add in $15 for an sVideo-to-RCA adapter for the nVidia card. I can't 
actually find the entry for the ATI Radeon VE, but the price is about right 
for inexpensive vidcap cards.

But ...

>Why would you need to add another 15-20% to the cost? Isn't that what you're
>charging $25/hour to set the thing up? Maybe if you want to run a business off
>of this, but the impression I got was that it would be more like a service 
>to make
>a little bit of money, like the people that make the IR blasters and sell 
>them.

Well, how many $25 hours do you have in mind here? There is time spent 
shopping for the parts, ordering and receiving them, building the box, 
installing the OS and Myth, doing burn-in tests (I hope), possibly bringing 
the machine on site and configuring it, and doing any post-sale support 
(see warranty issues, above, if nothing else) you think necessary. A 
business would need better documentation than we accept from people who are 
working for free, too ... creating that is a fixed cost you need to recover 
somehow.

I'd guess that a small-scale operation would involve about 4 hours per 
host, and that only if you were pretty hard-hearted about user support (not 
impossible ... Fry's seems to thrive on a low price/lousy service business 
model). And it assumes you buy, not build, the IR Blaster (How long does it 
take to build one? I'd guess an hour, but I've never tried).

Since 4 x $25 = $100, or 25% of your estimated parts cost, you seem to be 
in the same price range as "add another 15-20% to the cost".

>Even charging $500 for the above setup without any "support" to add features
>and such, just pointing to this list, that's the same price as getting the 
>$250
>tivo with the $249 lifetime service. Not to mention that, but it also has 
>2-3x more
>recording time than the $250 tivo, and it's still a computer when you're 
>done with
>it (and a pretty decent one, I might add). You can't really turn a tivo into a
>windows box if you don't like it, can you? Not to mention the other neat 
>features
>it has that tivo doesn't, like the auto-commercial skip, the ability to 
>burn vcd's and
>transfer the recordings to other computers, and the easy frontend/backend 
>setup.

If you are talking about selling to technically unsophisticated users, then 
you shouldn't assume they'd be able to repurpose the system at a future 
time ... especially one that lacks any removable storage (just how do you 
install *any* version of  Windows on a system with no floppy and no CD 
drive?). Anyway, a 1.7 GHz Celeron isn't state of the art *today* ... two 
years from now, it won't be anything very attractive at all.

You can't burn VCDs on a host that lacks a CD burner, as your configuration 
does ... and the re-encoding hoops one has to jump through seem a bit 
demanding for the target audience anyway. Myth setup isn't bad, but is it 
really *easier* than TiVo? (I've never set up a TiVo, so I don't really 
know, but I'm a skeptic on that one.)

>And if people don't have a router already, they can throw in a second NIC and
>let it be a router for them too which shouldn't peg the CPU at all, 
>although this
>is still kind of nerdy to do :)

If "they" are knowledgeable enough that can do this, then they are not your 
target market. And the security issues this arrangement raises are not 
trivial. These days, a standalone Linksys router costs less than a NIC and 
an hour of install time ... I've been building and using Linux-based 
routers for years, and I can't convert a host into a router in less than an 
hour.

Others have raised some of the right issues as regards remote support 
(especially with any customer who lacks a 24/7, static-IP Internet 
connection), upgrades, codec license fees, and accommodating changes in the 
source for TV listings. None of it is unmanageable ... but managing all of 
it takes time (and perhaps extra expense for your Internet connection) ... 
more of those $25 hours that have to be covered somehow (unless you really 
view this activity as either a hobby or philanthropy so are willing to do a 
lot of unpaid work ... just to let other people watch TV more easily).

Me, I wouldn't touch it unless I could figure out a way to make a decent 
living at it. So far, I can't.