I wasn't sure which forum to use to ask for hardware recommendations from the gurus, so I used this "general" forum.

I recently decided to build a HTPC and buy a HDTV display (either front projection or rear projection, haven't decided yet, but that's a different issue). I have never built my own PC before, but I'm a fast learner and also reasonably good at troubleshooting. After spending some time researching this on the internet, KnoppMyth looks like the best option for me. I am new to Linux per se, but not new to Unix or X-windows (I know the user stuff, but don't know most of the sysadmin stuff). Therefore I don't expect to have too many problems getting comfortable with Linux.

Since I plan to buy components and build my HTPC from scratch, I have been researching hardware. I am planning to buy the HD-3000 HDTV tuner card from pchdtv.com whenever they finally get around to selling it. This will be my primary tuner card and will be used to view and record OTA HDTV broadcasts. I also plan to add a secondary QAM (not HDTV!) tuner card that works with my cable set-top box and preferably also works with analog OTA braodcasts. Can someone please recommend a suitable card? I'd like to be able to record two shows simultaneously using my two tuner cards, or to view two shows simultaneously using the two cards and PIP, or to view a show using one of the cards and also a PC application (browser, email client etc) simultaneously using PIP. Oh, and Closed Captioning is very important to me. I'd appreciate any recommendations.

Another question: I plan to buy the latest hardware in order to minimize problems with setup and day-to-day use, and also to maximize my future upgradeability options. Specifically, I plan to buy an Intel Prescott socket 775 CPU (probably 3.2GHz) with HT, a mobo with onboard sound/networking/firewire/USB2.0 using the Intel 925X/ICH6R chipset, 2x512MB 533MHz DDR2, 250GB SATA HDD, a 16x PCI-E graphics card such as the nVidia GeForce 6600 GT, and a power supply that delivers at least 400W. I don't plan to overclock or play games, this will just be a HTPC. Am I making the right decisions here? Is this too much? Too little? Anyone using any of this stuff with KnoppMyth? Any compatibility issues? Any special tweaks I need to know about? What sort of case should I buy? Any other advice about this?

Oops, just noticed that there's a "hardware" forum under KnoppMyth for posting questions about hardware. Sorry for posting in the wrong forum. Moderators, if you want to move this thread there, please do so...

well lets see there are a few issues. first mythtv is not designed to do any pc application in a pip mode.

and knoppmyth in particular is not currently good with sata drives, however some people have made it work.

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Thanks for the reply. Can I view 2 TV shows (using 2 tuner cards) using PIP in MythTV? If that works, and I have to switch back and forth between PC and TV in order to surf or email, I guess I'd be OK with that. Also, if one of my tuner cards has TV-out, I could feed it to one of my TV inputs, feed my nVidia video card's output to the TV's DVI input, and use my TV's PIP feature, I guess. Hmm, that would probably also work for PC applications.

About the SATA drive issue, I guess I'll do a search and see if there's a version of KnoppMyth out there that works well with it and is accepted by the Linux community. Also, it might be sacrilege to say this here, but I'm not married to the idea of using Knoppmyth. I just saw on the web that it's the easiest way to setup a linux-based HTPC. If it doesn't work for my specific case, I could use a version of some other Linux distribution (Red Hat, Knoppix, Suse, etc) and install MythTV separately if that would do the trick. Does anyone have any recommendations about which version of Linux I should use with a SATA drive and the other hardware I mentioned?

yes tv pip works, although I don't think recorded with live in pip works.

As far as installing another linux distribution goes no it's not sacrilege. Knoppmyth is designed to be an easy quick way to install a sole purpose settop box. If you are wanting lots of other applications, particularly you mentioned email. There currently is not a mythtv plugin for this. Then you most likely would want another distribution, and any current distribution would work fine with sata, however getting mythtv working properly on any other distribution is more difficult.

I really don't think the two different outputs is going to work for you. It may be possible, but it would be a rather difficult setup, and I don't really recall anyone doing it. I suppose you could run each display with it's own X somehow.

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Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets