ZeeVee's localcasting ZvBox now shipping, available from more places

If our gallery of hands-on pictures from this morning were all you needed to pull the trigger on ZeeVee's ZvBox, well, we'd surmise that you have more money than sense. Regardless, if you've done your homework and feel confident that the localcasting box will make your life remarkably better, you can rest assured that units are shipping out now. Better still, those uncomfortable with Amazon for whatever reason can now secure the box from Best Buy, J&R, NewEgg, TigerDirect, and ZeeVee's own storefront. Unfortunately, the $499 price tag hasn't gotten any easier to swallow.

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 4th 2008 8:09PM]

Pretty clever!

Essentially a QAM modulator - HD input is RGB from the VGA output of your computer.

Reading the install instructions, there is brief mention of installing a provided notch filter in series with your cable feed. This creates a notch where ZeeVee can create a new channel. Quite similar to the old analog NTSC modulators; instead, uses the better QAM that cable systems and most HD TVs can detect and decode.

Question: how does ZeeVee know what notch filter to provide? Different cable systems have different empty channels. The docs don;'t seem to provide much detail in this area.

Then again, if you are not using cable feed, then you have the entire cable bandwidth available.

Somehow, I would have expected that future set top cable or satellite decoder boxes would do something like this. Like the ch3/ch4 modulators of old.

Mike

[madgamer2000 Posted Aug 4th 2008 10:21PM]

I think that the price on this is entirely relevant to how many TV's you have and how large your house is. At $500 you are certainly not going to get it for an apartment or condo with 1 or 2 TV's, but if you live in a house that's say over 2k square feet and have 3-4+ TV's then it doesn't seem that unreasonable at all. I mean, even cheap set top boxes for all over the house would end up costing more and if you didn't want to use wifi or didn't already have it, then you have more costs still to set that up. Also, it would seem like the larger the house, the less likely you would be to have a computer convenient near to the TV's in every room, making it more worthwhile to having something that you can remotely hop on the net with.

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 6th 2008 11:42AM]

Any updates from Engadget on how the ZvBox works?