FAQ
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* How much time it takes to build box like this one and how much does it cost?
My estimate on costs (excluding TV or other displaying device) are somewhere between 500€ and 1000€, but much closer to the lower bound. This heavily depends on how much you wish to spend on making your box as quiet as possible, how much storage do you need etc. If you don't care much for noise, price can go well below 500€ for an average HTPC box with more than decent processing power. But, no matter what are your goals, it will always be less expensive than buying separate boxes for TV timeshifting, DVD video player, DivX playback with internal storage etc.
And for time it takes to build one, well, this tutorial is doing it's best to make it as short as possible. If you're familiar with Linux, basic functionalities could be accomplished in just one weekend, but further tweaks will take you much more time. But you'll most probably enjoy it :)
* Doesn't running simultaneous components hog the whole system?
No, we are living in 21st century, where hardware is far more capable than software :). In practice, only application that is constantly using CPU is MythTV and that takes aroung 22% of my Centrino Dothan @ 1,75 GHz. Remaining 78% of CPU time are enough even to play Full HD video in cinema component. And this is an old processor - with today multi-core processors things are even better.
For memory usage, it is even less concerning. RAM is cheap and all components that I've setup and described here never use more than 512 MB of available RAM. But considering its cheap price, you should buy at least 1 GB, if for nothing else then to be used as disk cache.
