Network interface for Mk1?

You can use board which in theory should give a Mk1 an ethernet interface. It basically connects via the IDE interface like Patrick's composite board. Of course, there aren't any drivers or support for it in the empeg and the board is apparently very expensive. But it's an option *shrug*

10/100Base-T Ethernet Controller for server communication.

100 Mbps connection, eh? Sweet.

Not that I have a Mk1.

Interesting. How much exactly is this thing?

And couldn't it be used to give a MKII an 100mbit interface as well? Schweet!

It's a price heard from a friend-of-a-friend so may be totally wrong but it was about £400.

It would give it a 100Mbit/s interface but you won't get anywhere near that speed. The IDE interface in the empeg uses PIO which limits it to under 1MB/s. You may get a little increase by going to 100Mbit/s ethernet but you won't get 10x the speed.

Perhaps there's more going on than that page indicates, but, from the look of it, it doesn't actually expose the network functionality to the host CPU -- it just appears to the Empeg as a normal disk.

What would be cool, though, would be to use this to convert a Rio Central, or a Tivo, to use network-attached storage: have a hocking great RAID array off in your loft or somewhere you don't care about the noise, and Central or Tivo back in your living room has one of these in and just believes that it's a vast, silent, low-power local drive. (If you're thinking of doing this, check that it suppors LBA48 first.)

Peter

Hmm. Yeah. Rereading it now does make a lot more sense. Oh well

If you're interested in making a TiVo style thing with a massive NAS somewhere then it's probably cheaper to just build it yourself from other parts. A fanless VIA EPIA board, Hauppauge PVR 350 card for hardware MPEG + TV out and something like MythTV to run it all. You can have many clients all running off a single server and multiple tuners as well.

If you're interested in making a TiVo style thing with a massive NAS somewhere then it's probably cheaper to just build it yourself from other parts. A fanless VIA EPIA board, Hauppauge PVR 350 card for hardware MPEG + TV out and something like MythTV to run it all. You can have many clients all running off a single server and multiple tuners as well.

Nah... It's cheaper and better to just buy yourself a Replay that has this functionality built in and in Peter's case is built by another branch of his company. It wouldn't do a whole lot of good in the UK, however.

Matthew

Yup. In the UK

We're still on v2.5 software for the S1 TiVo. That's it for standalone PVRs in the UK basically. The only other one is Sky+ which is the equivalent of DirecTiVo.

I've actually got an upgraded TiVo but it's still very slow and definately needs more horsepower.

No guide data and no tuner right? I bet like the Aussies and the early TiVos you can swap out the tuner module for a PAL tuner. Then you just need to get guide data. Good luck there.

I bet like the Aussies and the early TiVos you can swap out the [ReplayTV] tuner module for a PAL tuner.

We looked into it. It turns out not to be simple.

Peter