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Comment by codemechanic | Hacker News Reader

You can have low-power media server running 24/7 for a fraction of electricity costs that your laptop consumes. I guess that is the point

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Use a portable HDD and plug it directly into you 360, it'll use a hell of a lot less power than a media server and will only consume power when your xbox is running. Totalling about 9W of extra consumption assuming constant usage of the USB drive while the Xbox is activated.

I can't see anything running for lower power than 9W.

it is just an alternative to home servers and consumes approx 5 watts. There are other uses for TonidoPlug - not limited to media streaming

So it itself consumes ~5 watts, does this include the hard drive and routers required to store and transmit the data, or solely the device itself?

Yeah that includes the hard drive. Once you have a 24/7 dlna/upnp server u can play not only from TV and other computers as well. It is not a game changing device but there is a value in it. i rest my case.

5watts is the consumption for the device itself, which includes 512mb of storage. An external hard drive would require additional storage.

It's a packaged sheevaplug http://www.marvell.com/products/embedded_processors/develope...

You can do the same thing using fuppes, an updated version of uShare. Fuppes also supports transcoding, uses a sqlite backend and can rescan watch folders to rebuild the database pretty quickly (either from cli or web interface, without restarting). I use it to stream to an xbox360 and it works perfectly. Haven't tried transcoding though since all my video is compatible.

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