Michal Dobrzynski wrote:
Besides that I wonder if the XBox is really that much cheaper than an epia board with small harddisk plus dvd rom.
Wonder no more. You can get 2 XBox's for the price of an epia board with NO hard disj or DVD-Rom. You can get 2 Xbox's for the price of a single full featured DVB card. In fact you can get an XBox at about the same price as a decent Linux supported Budget DVB-T card. For the money I've spent trying to get a PC to do the job reasonably I could have had about 10 XBox's AND a VDR server with 4 budget DVB-T cards in it.
Given the X-Box is basically a PC with a digitally restricted BIOS and has four USB sockets at the front then the cheapest HTPC (and in an only marginally ugly case) is an X-Box with a budget USB DVB-T adapter. For real hack value it might even be possible to cram the DVB-T main board inside the X-Box!
Using X-Box Linux you can run VDR directly on the X-Box *without* a second PC.