What the hell are these things drawing, 100W while not in use?
I thought there was some kind of legislated push to have lower standby power consumption on this kind of device? A lot of devices like this spend a majority of their time sitting around
waiting for inputs. Standby power use can't be
that difficult to minimize. My
air conditioner draws so little power when it's off that my cheap little multimeter can't even detect the current draw on the 120V side, and its circuitry continuously runs an internal oscillator, and the microcontroller always has to be ready to accept inputs from the buttons, the remote, or from its own timer interrupt.
If they lose power don't they also lose all the cable setting, i.e. TV stations and such? So unplugging them would be an incovenience as you'd have to wait for them to upload all that info
Options:
- Flash memory is dirt-cheap, at least for small amounts of it. I can't imagine that these settings files would require very much space, especially with a bit of basic compression.
- Supercapacitor for memory retention. These aren't terribly expensive either.
I guess they're trying to get the absolute cheapest cost possible though - as evidenced by terrible standby power consumption.
Other question I've got: Why does a set-top box take 10-15 minutes to boot? Is it running a 4200rpm hard drive over an ATA/33 interface, or what's the deal?
