MP user statistics (1 Viewer)

[pbb]

Ok, let's do one more today. One that is a bit related to previous chapter:

TV tuner cards

Most tuner card have only one tuner, but with the current shift towards digital television in Europe, hybrid tunercards become more interesting, which have multiple tuners. And then there are people who have multiple tunercards in their computer, or even multiple hybrid cards. And then there are those that don't even use MP to watch TV, and don't have any tuners at all. So how many tuners does the average MediaPortal user have?

• Average number of tuners per computer: 1.7

Having multiple tuners is very popular, either to be able to receive both analog and digital TV, or to watch one channel and record another. But the number of people with only one tuner in their HTPC is also still considerable.

Here is the distribution of types of tuner cards:

• analog: 29%
• digital: 58%
• hybrid: 13%

And in some more detail, the analog cards:

• software encoding: 3%
• hardware encoding: 98%

The digital tuners:

• DVB-S (satellite): 47%
• DVB-T (antenna): 43%
• DVB-C (cable): 10%

And the hybrids:

• software encoding / DVB-T: 46%
• hardware encoding / DVB-T: 54%

As for the brands, there is really only one brand that is being used for analog tuners:

• Hauppauge: 92%

But with such a big percentage, I can at least give some more details:

• WinTV-PVR-150: 47%
• WinTV-PVR-500: 31%

The choice between digital tuners is a bit more evenly distributed:

• Hauppauge: 18%
• Technisat (Skystar): 14%
• Technotrent: 13%
• Digital Everywhere (Fire/FloppyDTV): 13%

The numbers here are too low to dig up more details...

For hybrids, it's the old story again, though this time a bit less overwhelming:

• Hauppauge: 57%

The other 49% is distributed over too many different producers to display any usable numbers, but we have some details on Hauppauge:

• WinTV-HVR-1300: 55%
• WinTV-HVR-4000: 20%

Okay, that's all for today! Any more requests? I still have quite a few numbers in my spreadsheet

 

[Gixxer]

thats a lot of work there pbb !! congratulations, i must say i did the same as you to decide on my tv-tuner. i opened a thread but didnt get much information, actually i find this normal as i suppose its a very common thread.

so i decided to list all users in mp forum by the amount of messages they had, i though this would make sense as if u are more involved in the forum it means u have more information to get a good working tv-tuner. plus also people that work here would go the first ones, and if they have a certain tv-tuner is because its good.

i made a excel spreadsheet and also found out that hauppague should be the one to pick, and within that, for digital tv i found T500 was very popular

just wanted to share, that i appreciate the hard work of that stats.

plus i think this is a thread that will be linked for a long time when people ask about what motherboard to get, what cpu, how much storage size is needed, etc...

thanks

 

[pbb]

Hi Gixxer,

That is basically also what I did, except I sorted the list by most recent activity. That way, I hope to get more current HTPC configurations. (Users with very many posts have often been there for a very long while, and their HTPC configs may be outdated.) My approach did give me a very high amount of users without any system information (since most recent activity also included just-registered users) but I used a script to go through them so that wasn't too much of a problem.

Peter

 

[Gixxer]

Hi Gixxer,

That is basically also what I did, except I sorted the list by most recent activity. That way, I hope to get more current HTPC configurations. (Users with very many posts have often been there for a very long while, and their HTPC configs may be outdated.) My approach did give me a very high amount of users without any system information (since most recent activity also included just-registered users) but I used a script to go through them so that wasn't too much of a problem.

Peter

Thats absolutly correct, i just wanted a quick idea so i just got the first 20 or 30 users with more post, i also checked their cpu and motherboard to see if they were too old.

Okay, that's all for today! Any more requests? I still have quite a few numbers in my spreadsheet

the only other thing i can think of is the use of tvserver. i am thinking of going for it when i can and all the idea sounds so good that knowing that people are actually using it without problems would be motivating to go for it. The bad thing is that this is more dificult to find out i suppose.

 

[rtv]

88% using widescreen is quite interesting - can you filter it by those people like me watching a pumped up PAL picture against those lucky ones really using a widescreen resolution?

Another interesting part would be the used remote

 

[pbb]

the only other thing i can think of is the use of tvserver. i am thinking of going for it when i can and all the idea sounds so good that knowing that people are actually using it without problems would be motivating to go for it. The bad thing is that this is more dificult to find out i suppose.

I must say I haven't collected the data about TV-server versions, even though that info is on the same page as all the other data. Your suggestion is an interesting statistic if I ever do a follow-up research. I will keep it in mind!

88% using widescreen is quite interesting - can you filter it by those people like me watching a pumped up PAL picture against those lucky ones really using a widescreen resolution?

Do I understand right that you would like to see the amount of people that (can) see widescreen SDTV (low-res) versus widescreen HDTV? The numbers actually turned out more intersting than I thought. Here are the widescreen users, split up by display type:

• LCD: 58%
• CRT: 14%
• Plasma: 13%
• Projector: 9%
• Rear projection: 6%

If you compare these numbers with the overall numbers, you see that the number of CRT users is a lot lower, but the number of LCD users is about the same. (The other numbers are too low to say much.) This means that the 4:3 / widescreen ratio for LCD's is about the same as overall, but for CRT's the ratio is very high. The explaination is probably that LCD includes the people using MP on a 4:3 LCD computer monitor, while the lion's share of CRT users uses a 4:3 display.

Now, if I assume that CRT and rear-projection are SDTV, and LCD, plasma and projector are HDTV, you get the following numbers:

• WS SDTV: 20%
• WS HDTV: 80%

Another interesting part would be the used remote

Info on remotes I have! Watch out for next episode...

 

[pbb]

Ok, after having had a short holiday and having started to build my own dedicated HTPC, it's now time again for some more statistics. As promised, today we will be looking at ...

Remotes controls

Remotes are quite popular; 82% of the people who provided data on their HTPC, also talked about their remote control. Actually, less than 1% said they don't use a remote control!

What brands are most popular?

• Microsoft MCE: 39%
• SoundGraph iMON: 9%
• Logitech Harmony: 8%
• Hauppauge: 6%

Despite the popularity, the details about Microsoft's remotes are too sparse to give more details, but I can tell a bit more about the other brands.

SoundGraph iMON:

• By far the most popular iMON (over 60%) is the PAD, which means the plain remote control without any extras.
• Second (at over 25%) is the iMON VFD module.

Logitech Harmony:

• The most popular (ca 50%) Harmony is the 525
• At around 20% are both the 880 and 895

After all the external accessories that we've been looking at recently, let's go back to the core business:

Power supplies

Everybody needs a power supply. But there is a great variance in the amount of supplied power. Taking 100 watt ranges, these are the most popular:

• 300-400 W: 36%
• 400-500 W: 33%
• 500+ W: 23%
• 200-300 W: 5%
• 0-200 W: 3%

Wow, there are actually users that have 200W or less... Those machines must be very easy to cool (silently)!

With these numbers, the average power supply strength is no surprise:

• Average power supply: 405 W

And which brands are popular?

• Seasonic: 20%
• Antec: 12%
• SilverStone: 11%

Most popular at Seasonic:

• S12: 67%
• M12: 20%

The other brands were not supplied with enough detail to show more numbers.

More core business...

Cooling

I guess it won't surprise many people, but most users haven't done anything special with their cooling and are just running stock fans (the ones that were supplied with the system). Please note that the number below for stock cooling is probably lower than the reality, because many people with stock cooling won't have anything mentioned at all about it. This number is just based on the people that actually mentioned they are using stock cooling:

• stock cooling: 38%
• Zalman: 20%
• Arctic Cooling: 16%
• Thermaltake: 7%
• Cooler Master: 4%

The most popular Zalmans are the CNPS7000 series for processors, and VF900 series for graphic cards. The most popular from Arctic Cooling is the Freezer64 series.

 

[Gixxer]

great work !! thanks for the information

 

[petsa]

Hi pbb,

How about cases? It would be interesting to know how many users have a "real" HTPC case and how many use a more typical PC case.

/Peter

 

[Dadeo]

hi pbb, I know this is an old thread, but the data you collected is invaluable. How about an update! Just kidding. But it would be fantastic if there could be a way to get this kind of data on a regular basis from the forum database. I don't know what DB is being used but it should be possible. Ideallly a web gui interface to the forum database so the data is in real time. I think this data is incredibly valuable to developers, not just of the core, but plugins and skins also. And it would be much more reliable than say the screen poll with only 200 of 60,000 users responding!

I know, it's not like you guys don't have enough to do!