Building a PVR

[Octavious]

So i'm debating building a PVR from some computer parts i've had laying around for awhile and I have a few questions if anyone could help me out. I'm planning on using an old dell slim tower with a 2.66 GHz Pentium 4 in it and I don't know what ram/hddI should have on average or if the processor is too weak as i've never really built my own PVR. I've read through a few sites and it seems that Freevo is pretty decent and I already am familiar with Linux so I plan on just formatting the HDD to start fresh with the Linux install. Although i might put Windows XP media center on the box if I can't track down the drivers for the card.

tl;dr

When setting up a PVR is there a certain floor I should look to be above when considering a processor/ram/hdd. I'm having a hard time tracking down the effect a weaker processor or ram would have on the recording. I already surpass the base specs of the card I'm going to put in ( Micro Center - WinTV-HVR-1250 Hybrid Video Recorder ) something like that, I'm open to other cards too. Oh, and the box has 512mb~ RAM in it already iirc.

edit: found a post on the ubuntu forums that says Hauppauge cards should work on Linux, so now I'm just debating upgrading to a larger hard drive. Although I'm thinking 320gb is probably enough initially since it won't be HD recording.

[Avanarius]

delayed response, but does your board have a pci-e x1 or x16 slot?

most tuners are pci so just wondering if you overlooked it since you mentioned pentium 4

[Calina]

They did this on an early episode of systm

from what it says you need basicly 1GHz per show you want to record/watch at the same time so that P4 will work

heres link to the vid

Episode 2 - MythTV

planing on doing this myself with an old P4 box with an ATI all in wonder 9600 a friend gave me just ganna drop in a 500gb+ HDD

other then droping in newer higher capacity HDD and a TV tuner card any old PC will do it seems

[Octavious]

delayed response, but does your board have a pci-e x1 or x16 slot?

most tuners are pci so just wondering if you overlooked it since you mentioned pentium 4

Yea, the box has 1 PCIe x16 slot, and should be fine with the card. I've been looking into this more the last few days and i'm debating on a video card now so I can get 'ok' output. I'm thinking about using either MythTV or Freevo on Fedora but I'm not sure yet. Also, I think i said it but this will be all SD Cable so it won't be too bad to throw a 160gb HDD in there from what I have read.

I appreciate the input, it's kind of my first time building a PVR from the ground up. The last time I set something like this up I just used my laptop and Windows Media Center, so it was more or less plug and play.

[Calina]

Yea, the box has 1 PCIe x16 slot, and should be fine with the card. I've been looking into this more the last few days and i'm debating on a video card now so I can get 'ok' output. I'm thinking about using either MythTV or Freevo on Fedora but I'm not sure yet. Also, I think i said it but this will be all SD Cable so it won't be too bad to throw a 160gb HDD in there from what I have read.

I appreciate the input, it's kind of my first time building a PVR from the ground up. The last time I set something like this up I just used my laptop and Windows Media Center, so it was more or less plug and play.

SD TV is 350 MB per 1hr(40-43mins of actual show normaly) show without the commercials

HD TV is 1.1 GB for the same in HD(just including for future refrence incase you upgrade later)

but thats just going from all the shows i DL online idk if thats what mpeg 2/4 would be

but for a just SD 160gb HDD should be more then enough

and as for a GPU any cheap card will do and be much better then intergraded graphics(but not really a big deal try it as is for now if you feel you need it get 1 later)