I have understood SD to mean "Standard Definition" which I may have mistakenly equated to Analog. When I mentioned SD above that is an analog recording from my non-digital cable feed.

That is correct, a single CATV input feeds both tuners.

I'm not trying to split hairs here, I just want to make sure I understand everything correctly. The air2pc card that was mentioned earlier says that it is capable of SDTV and HDTV, but I don't think that it will actually work with analog, will it?

I think that if/when I go ahead with this it would be best to stick with the one PVR 500 and then if I upgrade to HD, worry about the tuners then... but if the dual core processors drop in price enough I would upgrade it to allow for simpler & cheaper HD expansion.

SD (standard definition) = 480i. This can be analog or digital.

All analog broadcasts are SD meaning they are 480i. Digital broadcasts can be 480i, 480p, 720p or 1080i. "i" means interlaced, "p" means progressive. CBS broadcasts 1080i. PBS subchannels are 480i.

All major network and most local analog TV broadcasts in the US are duplicated in digital. The only thing at this time not required to be digital is third-tier broadcasting. Like the low power stations with only Korean programming. They too will have to go digital by 2/09.

At this time, there is no need for an analog tuner in any recorder if you have a digital tuner. You won't miss anything. The air2pc card will not capture analog.

Don't worry about things being discontinued, all the parts you need at that time will be available and cheaper. Maybe cut costs by starting with a single tuner and cheaper cpu. These are the two easiest and least painful upgrades possible. I just added a second hard drive. I found the overhead of linux, myth, etc was 80gb. Keep that in mind with your disk calculations.

As far as an alternate case... I have an NSK2400 and really like it. Its quiet, well made, easy to work on, looks good, reliable. Wife puts up with it I don't trust newegg reviews with regard to sound levels, and for htpc this is important. You won't go wrong this case.

So if I understand you correctly, my standard cable TV which goes directly into my TV via a coax cable will work with the air2pc cards?

I guess if that is the case, I am not understanding why the hauppauge tuners cost so much more if they do less. I think I need to do some more research in the hdtv department, because I think I'm missing something here.

Go with an 'open box' for the CPU, too. That's how I snagged my x2 4200 for about $80 months ago at newegg. A Dual core is a no-brainer. Buy it now.

No, the air2pc will only do ATSC capture. Look for a low end hauppauge card for analog/cable capture. I have an OLD 401 dbx card and the 0.2 air2pc card in my IBM BE box. There are no tuners in the ASUS FE box. If you don't need ATSC right now, hold off, and hope that linux support for the pci-express atsc cards arrive soon. I was looking at some card a while back.

I have decided that I am not going to use this for HDTV, and not plan on doing it, ever.

Regarding dual core:
From the Knoppmyth FAQ


Is this just outdated or disregarding dual tuners? In any case, if I go with the Hauppauge PVR 500 the encoding is done in hardware anyway, so there isn't much CPU utilization.

I'm actually reading about a system from spideyk21 that is very similar to my proposal and he used 512 MB Ram and a Sempron processor. The documents I have read (while dated) have all indicated that using hardware encoding, no more than 512 MB RAM and probably a Sempron 64. I am thinking that I'll stick with the Athlon 64 and drop the RAM to 512 MB to save a few bucks.

Under the heaviest load with a PVR 500, should this struggle at all?

I plan on ordering this stuff tonight or sometime this weekend. Barring any setbacks I will be using the 512 MB RAM, PVR 500 with a Sempron 64 3400+ in the Linkworld case. I have no aspirations of HD. The rest of the hardware was pretty much set in stone (I think). If all goes well I will let you know next week sometime and hopefully get a chance to post in the Tier 1 forum

Good luck and welcome to the club!

Hope it works out for you!

I have the same motherboard in an Antec NSK2400 case. It's quiet! The component video board works nicely with video pass-through on my receiver.

Are you sure you don't want to do HDTV? 2009 will be here soon. I configured mine so it can play back one HDTV stream while recording or transcoding another, using only digital tuners. Even though we still have an old analog TV. Until we can save up for an HDTV monitor it just resizes down to SDTV while transcoding to save space.

Of course the pair of salvaged 120GB disks proved to be too small. At the moment I'm trying to move my recordings to a shiny new 750GB disk. Grumble grumble cuss cuss sigh...

We canceled cable and do all of our recording off the air. Bungied a cheap antenna in the attic. Even with the various additions that I've done, by going without cable the mythbox should easily pay for itself within 18 months of last winter.

Edited to add: Finally got it all moved to the 750GB drive. The trick was to realize that the auto upgrade blows away the root partition, and thus I had to leave the home+etc tarball in /myth/backup. (Meaning, don't move it off to my home dir which gets wiped in the upgrade.) Even though it meant keeping some configs that I didn't really want.

Thanks for all of your support guys. I ordered everything last night for $473.24 shipped. Not an insignificant amount of money, but if it all works as I hope, then it is well worth it. Four different vendors, so who knows when it will all show up, lol. I'll keep you updated.

BTW: Can anyone tell me if Knoppmyth R5F27 supports the Cool'n'quiet technology of AMD processors?

Let us know how well it all works after you put it together!

Those components should do what you need for now. You might also be able to do HDTV in the future if you change your mind. Just add the right capture card. If the processor turns out to be too slow for the task, by then much faster AM2 compatible chips should be affordable. Disk space can be conserved by transcoding.

In other words: With what you listed, you can start off cheap and still leave room for improvement.

The latest I have heard is the FCC is requiring the cable companies to supply an analog signal of the HDTV Over the air when the over the air signals are removed.

Quite a few of the components are in, and I just wanted to give people interested in this system an FYI.

The case I got from newegg (Linkworld 6280-01) came with a 400W power supply part # LPKS2 with no info about it. It only has one SATA power connector and a 24-pin motherboard power connector (with a 4-pin 12V connector). Oh, and strangely enough, the power supply was set to 230V instead of 115 when it arrived. I should have the motherboard and pvr-500 monday, so I will update you again when I get it all in.

edited: I previously said it had a 20-pin motherboard power connector, but it has a 24-pin motherboard power connector. My bad!

When you have it all together and running I'd like to know how loud or quiet it is. I started with a borrowed micro ATX case, which sounded like a jet engine at 4 meters through the walls of a home theater cabinet and around a corner. Whee!

After that I spent about 3x as much on my Antec case as you did on your Linkworld. I don't regret it at all. I'm curious how quiet yours turns out to be.

Let us know how loud everything is when you put it together. The complaints on newegg are saying the case is noisy.