Hi

first of all. mythtv and knoppmyth are great !!!

To go futher with my PVR, I need to upgrade my hardware which is :

CPU : P2 400
Ram : 256 megs
HD : 20 gb for the system and 30 gb for /myth/tv
PVR-250
Video Card : ATI (don't know which model exactly)

My machine is not powerfull enough to run the frontend on it, but very well to run the backend.
I would prefer to run myth on only one machine and hook up it to my tv.

Thus I'm wondering what is the best hardware to buy :

3 options

- buying a PVR-350
- buying an another machine (something like athlon 2000+ or faster)
- buying a another video card, with a tv out, but is it possible to find one with a mpeg 2 decoder, and is it supported by mythtv or knoppmyth ?


One more thing is that I dont want to spend a lot of money for that . I'm not very confident to buy a brand new machine, especially cheap machine, for the support by linux with that hardware. Most of the time cheap pc's are based on the VIA chipset.

Could you give me some advices and recommandations based that ?

Thanks in advance,

Yhan

Given the PVR-250 and case/power supply already in hand, you can easily put together an Athlon based PC for under $400.

HDs from good mail order suppliers were running $0.65 to $0.75 per Gb last month but seem to have gone up. You'll want at least 80Gb (using the bigger of the two existing drives as hda) call it ~$70

Pick a motherboard with an nVidia nForce 2 chipset and TV out for ~$70-$90

You'll also need an Athlon XP processor and heatsink for $60-70

And finally 512Mb of RAM for ~$100

Sadly all the prices seem to have jumped in the last month or two, although some bargain shopping should help there. With work you can push the total down closer to $300.

BTW - I've got a Athlon XP +2500 in my machine and it's always below 10% busy during video playback, and typically more like 5-7% busy. Having 512Mb of RAM helps here since it lets the system buffer a lot more.