Hi Everyone!

To begin, I want to thank everyone for all the useful information I've found on this message board!

I want to build my first MythTV box and wanted some advice on a possible hardware configuration and whether it will be able to handle recording OTA ATSC HD broadcasts, mainly:

CASE: ASUS P1-AH2
PROCESSOR: AMD Athlon 64 3800+ 2.4Ghz Socket AM2
HARD DRIVE: 500GB SATA Western Digital Caviar WD5000AAKS
MEMORY: 512MB PC25300 Corsair Valueselect DDR2 SDRAM
DVD-ROM: Lite-On 18X DVD+-R LH-18A1P
TV TUNER: Avermedia AVerTV MCEA180

Questions I have include:
1. Can I get away with a 250GB hard drive? I've read that HD broadcasts take up anywhere from 6-8 GB per 1 hour broadcast, and that's about 30 hours of recording time (not taking into account installation and miscellaneous files)
2. Can I get away with only 512MB RAM, or should I beef it up to 1GB?
3. How does burning HD content from hard drive to DVD work? I've read about MythArchive and other content-to-disc tutorials on non-HD content. For widescreen HD, does the box compress the video? If I play burned content on a 4:3 TV, will I get widescreen bars (top & bottom)?

Thank you for stopping by and taking the time to read and answer my post! I'm very excited at the prospect of building my first system!

1Gb is recommended for HDTV.

My main concern would be that capture card, I don't recall ever seeing it mentioned before. Unless you find a success story under the Tier 1 or Tier 2 Hardware Recommendation topics that specifically mentions it I'd pick one of the more commonly used ones.

Did you have success with this MB? Any troubles?

TIA