New machine from TVease.net coming on June 15th

Whats up everyone. You may or may not have heard of TVease.net. Its a small company owned and run by 2 guys. Me and my associate Chris.

We build and sell Ubuntu and Mythtv based media centers starting at 499. They are in HTPC cases and made to look like they belong in your living room. You might have heard of our machine, the "Hannibal".

We are releasing a new machine called "Zodiac" on June 15th and here are its specs and some of the custom features we have added to it.

Hardware Specs

2.8 Ghz Dual Core Intel Processor
1 Gig DDR2 533 Ram
1 TB of storage (2 500 GB hard drives in raid0)
2 Hauppauge low profile 150 tuners
18X dual layer multi format DVD burner
802.11 G wireless out of the box
Free Wireless keyboard and mouse
19 in 1 card reader
VFD display
Capable of 1080P
Video can be connected through VGA, DVI, Component, Composite, or S-video
Audio is 7.1 Digital Optical, coaxial, or 2.5MM

The best part we think is the features that we have coded and added to MythTV.

1. Raid0 setup with multiple partitions. You will have 4 partitions. OS, Media, Restore, and swap. Awesome performance boost with raid0 setup.

2. The restore partition is something we are very proud of. This is designed so that if something gets messed up with your OS. You can boot into your restore parition and restore the machine to factory. The best part is you do this without losing any media files at all. No need to re rip all your movies and music to the hard drive.

3. One Button Backup. This is really neat and we love this. You plug in a USB hard drive and press the menu button called "One Buton Backup". The system automatically creates the directory structure needed and backs all your media up on your USB drive. It also copies your MythTV Mysql databases so that you can resore your system if needed. No need to set your channels back up or anything like that.

4. When you get your system, its ready to use. No setup is needed by you in any way. We designed this system so that someone who has never seen linux before can plug it in and go. When you boot the system for the first time, you will answer some questions about how you want to connect it to your TV, Stereo, your wireless setup, and it will step you through creating your Zap2it (guide info) account and your done. Ready to watch and enjoy.

5. Built in bit torrent downloads. With Bit torrents and rss feeds you can download anything you want to your system. Further more, it puts all the files in the right directories so there is no need to copy them yourself. Download a movie, its all ready in your movie directory.

Pictures are available at our site.

We are going to sell this system for 1399. What do you all think? We need feedback to tell us what you all want in the system. Suggestions for features and things like that.

Thanks for reading and let us know what you think.

Great questions.

1. We are using the onboard Intel graphics. That is why we chose the 2.8 Ghz dual core chip. More than enough power through onboard intel extreme graphics. This was something we took allot of time considering. We could have used a slower processor with a graphics card. This way accomplished a coupe things we wanted to do.
1. Getting the faster dual core processor without the graphics card is cheaper and still capable of 1080P without breaking a sweat.
2. It allows us to keep the cost of building down so we can keep the end price lower.

2. It is a very powerful system. We made it powerful so that it will play 1080P. Most of our customers now, use their cable boxes to stream the HD content to our machines for recording. The system is powerful to handle this and upgrades later on if you want. You can drop in an HD tuner and not have to worry about upgrading the processor or ram.

3. I understand and appreciate what you mean by this. We are taking steps to ensure that we are on the up and up. Bit Torrent is not illegal by any means and there are numerous bit torrent trackers that only have non copy written material on them. We will have our system pointing to those trackers. If he end user does soemthing other than this. That is on them. This is something we are taking a stand on as a company. Bit Torrent is legal and again, there are many, many sites that host nothing but legal content. We will not let the MPAA or RIAA scare us into not adding a feature that is legal in every way. Damn the man. This is something we feel strongly about. We had planned on putting this in our first system, and did not because we got nervous. To hell with it. We are doing nothing wrong and our users are doing nothing wrong. We refuse to bow down to the powers that be on the Bit Torrent capability.

Great questions.

Again some great questions. Here we go.

1. The ATSC and QAM tuners. We did a little research and found that 70% of america is still not HD. We chose the SD tuners to appeal to a large crowd. We will be following the Zodiac with another machine in a month or so that has ATSC tuners.

The zodiac also has a free PCI Express slot if you wanted to add a tuner yourself.

The problem is that even if you have the QAM and ATSC tuners, you can only receive un encrypted signals. Most of our current customers use the SD tuners and connect their cable box via fire wire for a 3rd tuner and get all their HD and pay channels through the cable box.

We design our systems to have a 6-9 month shelf life, meaning every 6-9 months we are going to release a new system. This is good for everyone. We always backport the software as an update from the new system. This way current customers get all the new features and things like that on their new systems. This is free of course. It also allows us to swing with the market so to speak. If we see that something is coming popular, we can add it on our next machine and backport it to our current machines.

2. The nvidia card. On our current models that is what we use, an aftermarket Nvidia card. We tried to find ways to increase overall performance, yet keep the cost low. By going with the dual core processor, we can then use the onboard intel xtreme graphics. Still more than capable of 1080P, but increases overall system performance and keeps the cost lower for everyone.

Not to mention, when you do updates, the Intel grahpics driver wont break like the Nvidia driver. If the kernel is updated you would need to then reinstall the current Nvidia drivers. This way, the end user can do updates to get the benefits of newer kernels and these things without worrying about the video breaking.

3. The Zodiac is not listed at our store just yet. Our release date is June 15th. If you go to our store at http://tvease.net then click on support at the top, this will take you to our forums and community. There is a forum for the Zodiac. This is where the pictures are.

To go straight to the community you can go to http://support.tvease.net

I am in Portland Oregon. You near me?