[vox] Tivo question

[Rob Rogers]

> On Monday 08 December 2003 06:53 pm, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
>
>> can you list components on that?  that seems *awfully* cheap.  i'm
>> interested because i haven't ruled this option out, but $300 seems
>> too cheap.
>
> It's fairly simple actually. You can find older PC's on EBay for < $200 and
> some in the $100 range that will do the job. Remember, you don't need a
> flying machine by any stretch of the imagine. It just has to be good
enough.
> Take this one, for example:
> http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2770648713
>
> In order to make it a total multimedia station, just add a TV tuner ($50 -
> $75), IDE DVD/CD RW combo drive ($50), and a video card with TV out ($50),
> and you're all set. If you have a wireless network that you want to connect
> to, then you can add that card for < $50. (I just looked up these prices on
> newegg.com. Refurbished hardware would be less.)

>From my experience (and that of many others on the MythTV mailing lists
and chat) that box will be unuseable with a standard TV Tuner. I've got a
standard Hauppauge bttv card, and my 1.4 GHz (not a 1400, and actual
1.4GHz) could record and play a single stream (or watch TV "live") with
the processer at 80-95% capacity.

You can go with the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250 but that will run you $150
($139.00 on newegg.com). It's got an on board mpeg-2 encoder, and will
take no processor power to encode, you just have to decode, which you can
do just fine with something in the 300-400MHz range.

> The part that's difficult is, as someone mentioned, configuring the TV out
> part and making sure all these components are compatible.

Depending on the card, TV out isn't all that hard. The Nvidia's actually
seem to be some of the better cards for that. The matrox G400 is also a
good card, but you need a dongle for the second VGA connector (their
standard dongle has S-Video, RCA and I believe digital all on one)