Anyone here made a "TV computer"?

[Phil Endecott <spam_from_debian_arm@chezphil.org>]

Dear All,

For a while I have been planning to make some sort of "TV computer" i.e. DVB
recorder + DVD player + web video device etc.  I was hoping to be able to wait
until there were easy hackable off-the-shelf ARM boxes to do this but I think
they are going to turn off my analogue TV signal in 3 days (!) and so it has got
a bit more urgent (when does the new Doctor Who start???!).  Has anyone here
tried to do this?

If I look at packages.debian.org I can see that lots of things like vlc, mplayer
etc. are available for arm* - but there's a difference between having built
successfully and actually working on real hardware at real data rates.  So do
those packages know about e.g. video hardware features in any of the available
ARM hardware?

I'm wondering if I can use a Pandaboard.  It has plenty of video output features
but it is a bit weak on the other connectivity - the DVD, DVB-T, disk and
ethernet would all be behind one USB hub.  Tegra devices are a bit stronger as
they have mini-pcie which could be connected up to SATA, but I've not found any
actually-available hardware that does that.


Thanks,  Phil