What hardware is in a comercial HD DVR?

[FrustratedUser]

Looking at HTPC setups for HD and it seems that the hardware requirements are high to do HD properly.
Now, some HD DVR boxes have been around for years (like the POS 8300HD DVR I just got) meaning the hardware inside are kind of dated by todays standards.
The simple question is; what's inside? How much processing power do they have (and so on)?

🙂

 

[The Boston Dangler]

for a cable box, start with a hot, loud, awful sounding 120GB western digital hard drive. then add a tuner or two, and ASICs for QAM256 demodulation, an mpeg-2 decoder, hdcp and 5c, a dvi/hdmi transmitter, DACs, and top it off with some very slow memory and cpu. mostly, these parts are meant to do only one thing, and do it as inexpensively as possible.

 

[destrekor]

yeah, the problem with PC PVRs is the fact that they are very inefficient since they aren't dedicated. The overhead from the OS and software, not to mention the encode/decode packages either sending the work to the CPU or to expensive fully hardware equipment makes, all combine to require a lot more horsepower than would be necessary.

That, and cablebox equipment is rented, but they do cost a pretty penny if you were to be able to purchase them direct. The tuners are basically the best tuners out there, took forever for PC tuners to come close to STB quality.

 

[erwos]

Those boxes generally use embedded chips from Sigma, TI, etc. to do some very specific tasks. They're not general purpose CPUs.

 

[FrustratedUser]

Probably ASICS and FPGA then.

 

[Lord Banshee]

Hopefully Soon,

Intel CE3100 http://download.intel.com/desi...3100-product-brief.pdf

Then hopefully Sodaville, from edacafe (http://www10.edacafe.com/nbc/a...ters&articleid=585800)

STB designers have been frustrated with the limited performance of SoCs based on licensed CPUs running at 300MHz to 400MHz. The CE3100 offers 4x to 5x the performance of these competing products. At a $35 list price and nearly 10W (TDP), however, the chip is overkill for all but the highest-end STBs and DVRs. We see the CE3100 as a placeholder until Intel can introduce its next-generation product, code-named Sodaville. Due next year, Sodaville will use 45nm technology and the Atom CPU to greatly reduce cost and power dissipation. Although RISC vendors are increasing the performance of their CPUs, Canmore and Sodaville will create new opportunities for Intel in the HD video market.

 

[freegeeks]

the problem is not always the hardware. I worked for an IPTV provider and the problem was not the STB hardware but the shoddy Java middleware application running on the box.