Hi there. First post, newbie questions ahead. I've trawled the archive, but I'm still not sure of the hardware set-up I'm after. Apologies if the answers lie elsewhere.

My plan: Pick up an old Dell Dimension v400 which my office are planning to trash, and install Myth. I am hoping to do this in the next few days.

Setup: UK terrestrial TV signal, TV, PC + Myth.

Requirements (as far as TV goes): record 2 different channels while watching a 3rd live.

As far as I can work out, I'll need to buy 2 TV tuner cards, probably the PVR-250. Do I need a 3rd card with video out? Or are there some alternatives here, like 1 card that can do the lot??

Many thanks for the info.

Well if you want to record two and watch another at the same time you will need 3 tuner cards, and If it's somthing that a workplace is throwing out you better go with 2 pvr250's and one pvr350 and your gonna have to use the tvout of the 350 with the mpeg2 accelleration. Even at that whatever any company in it's right mind would throw out will probably have a hard time keeping up.

its kind of hard to understand what exactly you want to do... figure out how many encoders you need first, since you seem unclear of that yourself. if indeed you want to be able to record two shows AND watch a third at the same time, you will need 3 encoders and one decoder/tv-out option. as stated, 2 pvr-250 and one pvr-350 would cover that nicely.

Thanks for the help. So if I drop my requirements a little, to recording 1 channel while watching another live, will I be able to pause the live TV?

Thanks again.

with two tuners you can record one channel and watch another one live and pause, and you could record two channels why watching a previously recorded show.

The problem you are going to run into is going to be processing power. If you do not have some sort of accelerated playback then you will have to have one powerfull machine to do all that. And that's concidering you are using hardware encoders like the pvr250/350. I don't know if there is a machine made that can encode three shows and decode one all at the same time.

As a reference I have an athlon 1700+ and one pvr250 hardware encoding card and one software encoding card, and I can record two shows and watch a previously recorded show, but it takes most all of my cpu to do so.

As one last option for watching 1 while recording 2, if you don't need the pause feature, you also have a tuner in the TV I presume. (I don't, I am using a 19" lcd as the output of my mythtv)

Note, while using this feature, you will not be able to pause, or skip back or forward what you are watching live. Since that's one of the great features of MythTV, I can't recomend that procedure, but it is an option. As it is already included with the TV, you arn't out the cash for the third tuner card either.