[plug] Myth TV v's PVR & DVD Recorder

[Bernd Felsche]

Michael Hunt <michael at aussie.oddsocks.net> writes:

>While looking at items for the Christmas stocking my wife floated the
>idea of purchasing a DVD recorder in order to enable her to send copies
>of 'Home and Away' to her sister-in-law who will soon be living in a
>remote party of PNG. I started talking to her about the benefits of
>PVR's over DVD Recorders and wondered if I might be able to float the
>idea of a 'myth tv' come media centre type system. The topfield pvr box
>looks very nice but I don't think its feature set is going to do what I
>want. (I want to dump the footage to DVD or VCD for smaller postage
>size. Plus the topfield only has usb for pulling footage off of the
>device when I have a perfectly good wired network).

If you're not in a hurry, slurping off the Toppy can be done overnight.

>Anyhow, I know a couple of people here have played with mythtv so I was
>wondering what kind of spec box you would put together (I'm particularly
>interested in quiet cases plus a digital tv card known to work with myth
>tv).

I had a configuration all written up a couple of months ago but a
dog ate it. :-)

I'm not too sure if MythTV will support something like:
http://www.auspcmarket.com.au/show_product_info.php?input[product_code]=SYS-HTKA7328

Plenty of space in the box; enough to "archive" your favourite 50
DVD movies and still have plenty of space for recording TV programmes.

Twin digital tuners can slot into PCI or USB(!!)... and are
recommended so that you can watch one programme while recording
another - or record two programmes at once!

Similarly, a DVD-ROM *and* a DVD-burner are handy because you can
watch a DVD movie while burning other material.

However: Cheapie DVD-recorder appliances are around $300, the
minimum hardware cost for the "perfect box" will be about 5 times
that. And I will only hint at the trouble that can be caused in the
household when YOUR BLOODY MACHINE DOESN'T WORK! :-)

If you really want to build such a machine, then give yourself a lot
of weekends to exterminate the bugs.
-- 
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