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Hello I am a long time member of the forums and even longer lurker of xbmc, i had to make a new username because for some reason i cant post on my old screenname, i think it is disabled for some reason (?)
Anyways, hello there.
I am a video game programmer/designer and recently bought one of those little set top boxes for watching netflix. It works as intended, but in my own personal opinion, I feel that if anyone I knew saw it, I might have to commit harakiri to avoid the great shame of them finding out how horrible its interface and programming is.
So I thought to myself, why not make my own.
so with some of the spare parts I had laying around in my office, I built one with xbmc on it.
now my question to you, the people, is this....
Would you want to buy a set top box that came with XBMC preinstalled?
naturally I want the xbmc developers involved and to be able to get their own cut so i also want to hear from them if they would allow me to do this.
it will not be very exspensive if this does happen.
I would like to make this the official xbmc STB is thats okay with the dev's.
As a venture of this sort would cost a lot of money to start up, I wanted to make sure there is a demand for this type of item.
I also have plans for making it do more than just playing movies, although I am choosing not to discuss them at this time, until I know if this is a go or not.
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So you built a box that runs XBMC with Netflix integrated ?
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We dont buy things, end of discussion.
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Jezz_X
Team-XBMC Skinner
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Indeed if the price is right I'm sure many people would want a pre built pre installed box that "just works" with no fiddling
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Note that the cost would probably have to fall somewhere between the cost of an AppleTV ($230) and an iPad ($500). It's extremely easy to get XBMC onto an AppleTV, but some people don't have the skill or hardware to do it. I note the iPad since it's a nice media platform and since there's other STB's in that price range.
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There's definitely a market for something like this, because a lot of my non-techie friends are completely blown away when they see my XBMC setup and want one for themselves, but they would have no idea how to go about building a set-top box of their own and installing XBMC on it and I'm too busy to do it for them.
But one thing to really consider is that the demand isn't necessarily just for the hardware/software work that goes into setting up XBMC, because the end user would also have to do a significant amount of work to sort their media in such a way that XBMC can scrape it.
You'd have a lot of unhappy customers if you just sold the box with XBMC pre-installed, they booted it up into the pretty interface, then they started downloading a bunch of improperly named torrents all into one folder and were shocked when the media didn't scrape properly.
In order to be successful, you'd also have to organize your customer's existing media for them, then install a comprehensive set of sorting/renaming scripts on their computer so they didn't have to worry about the backend at all. And you'd have to offer some kind of ongoing tech support for the issues that would come up.
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2010-04-22, 20:52
(This post was last modified: 2010-04-23, 01:27 by flaminglizard.)
nice to see that there are people that may be interested in this.
Yes it would be much more than a box with xbmc and streams netflix.
I am shooting for a retail price of between $80 - $150 (please be aware that this is a estimate and not concrete at the current time) with a monthly fee of anywhere from $2.99 to $9.99 after.
there will be two forms of the STB, one that comes with a hard drive for storing the media directly on the device, and one that does not that can either be patched in through ethernet or wireless to connect to your computer for videos/pictures/music/etc.
My hope is that with a commericial product that I can make a deal with a DB or even make my own that XBMC users get their own special access to a DB so everything can scrape from the same place by default (but can scrape from other places if the user chooses to do so)
in regards to scripts for renaming files and handling of folders, I have some that i made that i use for my own personal usage that i believe with a little editing and testing can be used in the box without too much problems.
I have big plans for this product and mr marshall, I will contacting the dev's soon with exactly how I am thinking about going about this.
thank you all for giving me your opinions/advice on this matter.
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The one big thing I see for this is a dedicated remote, right now on the amrket are either generic universal remotes or MCE specific remotes, while both of these can do most things ok there are several specific XBMC that aren't covered or have too many unused buttons.
Also having a remote that "just works" would be a great tool instead of patching together a reciever and remote combo and hacking the lirc/keymap.
All together I'm interested to see what direction you're taking this project as a whole, the only thing that makes me nervous is your estimated price point. That seems too low to have effective hardware (ion chipset or crystal broadcom hd) but I haven't seen your internals yet.
Good Luck with the project and keep this thread up to date if you can.
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2010-04-23, 01:28
(This post was last modified: 2010-04-23, 01:44 by flaminglizard.)
in regards to the remote that will used with STB, it will be a unique design that has not been used with STB's before.
I am currently working on a design that I believe people famaliar with the original xbmc will happy with.
