I'd like to have the box by my TV as quiet as possible. I'd also rather avoid running coax, so it'd be nice if this box could have the TV tuner in it. Is it possible to get all the data to be sent straight over the network to another box, so there's no local disk access? Will it be able to handle watching it live/almost live at the same time?

The second box can run mythtv if necessary, and I can give them a dedicated 100Mbps link (would I need Gigabit?). I'm guessing it would be best to run box number 2 (noisy) as the master backend, and box number 1 as a frontend and a secondary backend? I can foresee issues here if I wanted to burn something to DVD on box number 2 - would it think it needed to fetch the stuff from box number 1, or could I just tell it to get it locally.

The next step would be to try to get the frontend to be entirely diskless - either network boot or from flash memory.

On the offchance it'll make a difference, I'll be capturing UK "Freeview" - Digital TV over terrestrial arial. The backend wouldn't ever be used to watch stuff (it's got no monitor) but DVD burning would be good. At present I haven't bought any hardware for the frontend; I have a box I might use as the backend, it's an old PIII 450, but this should be good enough for just saving stuff to disk and the odd DVD burn, right?

My slave frontend saves files to my master via NFS (LinHES). Your hardware should be ok for a master w/ a DVB tuner. I suppose one could have a diskless master if one wanted...

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!