Craig Sanders wrote: ...
the main things i'm not sure about are:
what CPU to get?
i'm tempted by an athlon 64, but then i'd have to start mirroring the a64 distribution of debian as well as the i386, and i'm generally not keen to pay a price premium to be a guinea-pig for new hardware....a64 and a64 motherboard designs probably won't be mature for another year or so.
other alternatives P4 or and Athlon, with the athlon being slightly cheaper.
VDR works happily with a 150MHz CPU if you have a full-featured card or with under 1 GHz if you don't. At least here in Germany the best price per GHz according to http://www.geizhals.net/deutschland/?cat=cpuk7sa&sort=r is an AMD Duron 1800Mhz, which should be more than adequate.
The only function you can always speed up with a faster CPU is re/encoding for DVD burning, but unless you do that several times a day, I would not spend extra money for a few minutes less wait time.
what video card to get?
i have a matrox G450 in my desktop - is that adequate? i'm thinking of upgrading my desktop video card anyway, which will leave the matrox spare. actually, i'm sure it's adequate - the real question is, "is it a *good* card for a dedicated VDR box?"
Matrox cards are know to produce the best signal quality. So, get an Nvidia card with DVI output and a flat panel for your desktop (then signal quality will not matter) and use the Matrox for your VDR system.
Carsten.