I have a 9 PC home network with myself and my 2 roomates. I am looking to add a media center PC to the mix (horray free work computer!) I am getting an AMD athlon 2400+ that I am going to upgrade to 2 gb of ram and add a 256mb DX9 video card. I have a few questions though. I want to use it for media center duties: DVR, DVD playback, MP3/music exct. I am hoping to use the open source front end media portal. My questions are manifold: first what should I get for a TV tuner? 2 ATI 650's or 1 hauppauge PVR500 dual recorder. I am looking for digital TV quality with the possibility of HD, which leads me to my next question: if i place it between my digital settop box and the TV will I get HD content or can I only receive HD signals over air? Third: I have a gigabit network going to my dual P2 333 storage server. Will I be able to stream the signal to the server and write it to harddisk or do i need more bandwith? (i am 90% certain the server can handle it). Finally, can anyone suggest a good DVD upconvert codec? Post your thoughts and I will post my questions as i come across them. Also comment on my hardware, think its too little too much whatever.

3/29/2007 11:59:37 PM

I'm guessing you mean you want to use MythTV. This site should answer a few of the questions you asked:

http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-3.html#video_capture_device

I know the PVR500 card is supported, but it looks like MythTV might have some trouble with the ATI cards, though I'm not sure about that one in particular. As far as the HDTV goes:

Quote :

"NOTE: There are no known consumer-level capture devices which will allow you to capture the HDTV output (DVI, HDMI, VGA, YPbPr / Component) from a set-top box commonly found with digital cable systems or satellite systems. None of the capture devices listed above perform any encoding; they merely allow your computer to save a copy of a HDTV stream which has already been converted to MPEG-2 at the broadcast facility."

Also, according to this page, the 2400+ would be able to play 720p, but they recommend a P4 3.2Ghz equivalent to be able to play 1080p. However, since you're putting a new video card in it, that might make a difference in what it's capable of.

I've only ever used MythTV with the backend and frontend running on the same machine, so I don't know about the networking question, but I would think that gigabit is plenty fast.

Good luck with the set-up, Myth can be kind of a pain in the ass sometimes. If you're not dead set on using a certain distro or anything, you might want to check out KnoppMyth or Linux MCE. Linux MCE is relatively new, but its a fork off of Pluto Home. If you feel the need to control your entire house with your cell phone, MCE/Pluto is all over it.

[Edited on March 30, 2007 at 8:46 AM. Reason : ]

3/30/2007 8:45:23 AM

I'm planning on using Windoze XP for this machine. I'm going to use media portal http://www.team-mediaportal.com/ to provide a front end. So what thats saying is that even if I get digital cable and plug my tuner card into the coax cable I wont be able to get digital content? or will i get digital content and not get HDTV? If I only get digital thats ok, if not i need to rethink this. Again, thanks for the input.

3/30/2007 9:40:22 AM

with a qam tuner you could get the free ota content and analog content, but that's it. a tivo series 3 and the dvr from your cable company are the only things that will let you record subscription hd content atm.

3/30/2007 10:47:58 AM

I dont mean HD. I mean digital SDTV over the cable.

3/30/2007 10:51:24 AM

back from vacation bump

4/1/2007 3:01:32 PM

It's not free but I highly recommend BeyondTV, easy to set up, you can stream to other computers on your network, etc

http://www.snapstream.com

4/1/2007 5:22:03 PM

what the heck is wrong with you people, he already said he's using MediaPortal

i would recommend hauppauge over anything ATi

as of now there is NO tuner capture card that supports digital cable, nor digital HDTV

only OTA HDTV is supported and only basic cable set-top boxes.

4/1/2007 6:42:05 PM

The new ATI 650 HDTV wonder seems to support digital cable, non HD but digital cable. They are coming out with a cablecard card soon but that's neither here nor there. Yes, I'm using mediaportal. Its open source, and it has the most behemothic feature set I've ever seen. I'm fairly sure I've figured this out for myself but thanks for the replies.

4/2/2007 10:23:12 AM