Hi, I'm new to this PVR lark, although I have been using an EPIA min-ITX box as a Divx/DVD player using geexbox for a year or two.
I hope this list is OK for asking relative newbie questions - please point me elsewhere if it's not the right spot.
I want to add DVB-T reception to my media box, and ideally have it replace the video recorder too, but it remains to be seen if it has sufficient welly.
A fair amount of net-wandering suggests that the Hauppage winTV USB and USB2 cards are both suported but they use different chipsets - is that right? Any pros and cons between them? My gut feeling is that the USB2 should be better as the interface to it is faster, but the hauppage specs say that the older card needs a 500Mhz host, whilst the newer one needs a 1Ghz host. Does the newer one really need more from its host, or this just an effect of the (windowsa) software they supply? Also I can find a lot more docs for the older device - is the new one a bad idea at this stage?
My box is very slow (and thus silent) - it's an EPIA 800Mhz box, too old to have built in MPEG deconding. It plays divxs fine, but glitches slightly playing Full-res DVDs. I think adding a hollywood + PCI card will help it do playback with less load, and is the only chance of it being able to play something whilst recording something else. But that will fill its only PCI slot, which is why I am considering USB for the TV input. Does this make sense, or should I forget trying to play and record at the same time and just put in a PCI winTV card?
I could upgrade the box to use an M10,000 motherboard and an internal DVB-T card instead but that's best part of 100 quid more expensive, so I'm hoping to get away with it. TV quality is not too important, so long as it's not much worse than a VCR, that's fine.
Also, is there a distro like geexbox which boots up quickly to PVR mode, with everything controlled through the OSD?
TIA
Wookey