Okay, from reading these forums and the FAQ I have determined that in order to record one channel while watching another and retain my rewind/ff/ pause functions I will need two tv tuner cards. Okay, assuming that one of the cards is a PVR 350 so that I can use its tvout functionality, what is the best option for the second card? PVR 250 or 150?

I have 2 250s in my box. They work very well.

At this point, unless you can lay hands on an older PVR-250, you might as well go with the PVR-150, since either one may require new IVTV drivers, and the price differential is significant. Hauppauge has been replacing chipsets at a dizzying pace, and the driver developers are racing to keep up.

I recommend the PVR-500. Why have two tuners when you could have three?

-brendan

The PVR-500 is MCE only and dosn't come with a remote. PVR-150 comes in both flavours and you get not only a remote but an IR blaster with the non-MCE version.

Exactly how many remote controls do you need for one box? The first post stated that they're putting a 350 in there already.

Gonz

Thanks for the feedback, guys. A problem I realized, though is that I can't fit two tuners in the box I want to build... I want to build a set-top out of one of those small form factor shuttle boxes, and they only have one pci slot. Is there any way around this? Perhaps an external tv tuner? That sounds like it would be expensive, though...

I started with one of those but replaced it due to lack of expansion room for additional disks or cards. I just saw a review of a new Silverstone case that takes a normal microATX motherboard and and other standard components and is only slightly bigger than the basic SFF stuff.

Plextor has a usb tuner that has linux drivers. You may want to look around and see how well it is supported with myth. It sounds interesting though, it supports mpeg4 and divx encoding in hardware.

http://www.plextor.com/english/news/pre ... PVR_pr.htm
http://www.plextor.be/products/px-tv402 ... 0PX-TV402U
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl ... 37&tid=106

any answers to the question earlier about how many remotes you would need with 2 tuners?

Only one remote required.

I'll look into that. However, one of the reasons I wanted the shuttle was that this particular case has the ps on the outside of the case, sort of like a laptop ps. This sounded like it would be much better for a living room set top box as I would be eliminating the noise from the ps fan...

I'm currently running a PVR 350, 250, 150 & 150MCE in the same box and it works perfectly. You just need to properly configure the IVTV drivers which really isn't that hard. I would recommend going with a 150 (has a remote) and a 150MCE (no remote). Or, just get a PVR 500 and only use one slot but I don't have any experience getting a PVR 500 working.

to be a little clearer, the remote controls the frontend....one fronend -> one remote. the frontend asks the backend to record on its tuner(s).

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R5F1 - Dell P4 2.4Ghz 500MB - PVR250 x 2 - GeForce FX 5200 - Onboard sound/NIC 80GB ATA/250GB ATA/400GB SATA

Yes, you may be able to fit two PCI cards even though you have just one PCI slot. Search for "dual PCI riser" card. Here is one at Login Supply:

http://www.logicsupply.com/product_info ... ucts_id=63