wishlist: elgato/lacie mac mini pvr
we're so close... if Elgato just stuck their kit in a mac mini shape case, like the lacie/iomega "piggy-back" cases, we'd have pretty serious living room pvr. Add a 3.5" hard drive in the box (that little laptop 40Gb in the mini won't do), place the IR sensor on the front, and you're away.
Sure, you could do it all today, but just a bit of packaging would mean it would sit in the front room without looking like a geek project. It would be a product - not a hack.
I know that plenty of companies have been burned by developing a project and then finding Apple releasing a solution that kills their market, and this looks a pretty likely scenario here - but apart from retooling the case, there's very little that needs development money spending on. And there's one thing that guarantees long term success - Apple make world products - not niche ones, which was easy when the world was NTSC/PAL, but now the world is cable, satellite, DTT, freeview, 720p, 1080i and there isn't yet a chipset that covers them all (yet). Which leaves a market for the third party people like elgato.
freeview (DTT), a remote and a hard-drive in a £150 mac mini upgrade? I'd buy one today. Hell, show me an empty mac mini style hard drive case and I'll make one.
Now if only frontrow had a plugin architecture that would mean we don't have to drop out into OSX to use eyeTV... oh, and a mini bluetooth keyboard/trackball...
Sure, you could do it all today, but just a bit of packaging would mean it would sit in the front room without looking like a geek project. It would be a product - not a hack.
I know that plenty of companies have been burned by developing a project and then finding Apple releasing a solution that kills their market, and this looks a pretty likely scenario here - but apart from retooling the case, there's very little that needs development money spending on. And there's one thing that guarantees long term success - Apple make world products - not niche ones, which was easy when the world was NTSC/PAL, but now the world is cable, satellite, DTT, freeview, 720p, 1080i and there isn't yet a chipset that covers them all (yet). Which leaves a market for the third party people like elgato.
freeview (DTT), a remote and a hard-drive in a £150 mac mini upgrade? I'd buy one today. Hell, show me an empty mac mini style hard drive case and I'll make one.
Now if only frontrow had a plugin architecture that would mean we don't have to drop out into OSX to use eyeTV... oh, and a mini bluetooth keyboard/trackball...
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