Hello everyone,

i am new to mythTv and am not exactly an expert at linux and i was looking to build a system that would be out of the box ready to go....i see some guys posted what worked for them...the question i have i just really want the ability to watch tv and record another program at the same time...i dont see myself doing two programs at once...what kind of system do i need?


Thanks,
Al

Simple math and logic. To tune two different channels at the same time you need two tuners.

1) You can always revert to the tuner in your TV when the PVR wants to record something else. This means you can't do things like "pause and rewind live TV", but it's cheap and realatively easy.

2) You can put two tuner cards in your PVR box.

All of this presumes that you're not currently depending on something like a cable or satttelite box to do your tuning for you. If you are, then for anything other than "bypass" channels which you can tune without the box, you would also need two cable boxes. (This is one of the reasons I've always tried to avoid having a cable box myself, even when I was time shifting with a VCR. I want ALL the signals available at the splitter that feeds the various tuners.)

Two tuner cards means you need a motherbaord with at least two PCI slots. Any of the MicroATX or ATX motherboards meet this requirement. You should probably skip the really tiny cases to avoid thermal problems.

Everything else you should be able to find in existing threads.

If you're going to use more than one tuner card I would suggest getting at least one hardware based encoder. I don't think two software MPEG tuners are going to work very well unless you have a very fast CPU. Retail box PVR-250s and 350's are well supported and are excellent tuners IMO.