[vdr] Building a VDR box

[Vesa Holopainen <vholma@pp.htv.fi>]

Hello,

I'm kinda new to this PVR scene, but now that I've read stuff about PVR
systems in general and about VDR in particular, I'm about to build
myself a vdr box. So here are a few questions, hope you guys can help me
out. Firstly I'd like some advice on which card to buy. I live in
Finland and I'm connected to a cable network, so I guess I need a DVB-C
card. What sort of things should I look for when buying a dvb card for a
vdr box? And is there a recomedable store somewhere in europe where I
could order such a card for a good price.

And secondly, I'd like to be able to do other thing as well with my box,
ie.watch movies in all formats, play some games, play mp3:s, maybe even
read my e-mail. I've understood that playing movies is possible by
decoding the video stream and re-encoding it to mpeg2. But I've got a
matrox g400 card which I could use in my box so I'd like to know whether
it would be possible use the tv-out feature of the g400 card in the VDR
framework. The pros would be obvious but what would the cons be, if any
(given that it would even be possible)?

Thanks in advance