Im about to build my first Myth box, ive got everything ready apart from the tuner. Im looking to have 2 tuners, a IR remote and preferably hardware encoding (mpeg-4? whatever the smaller file size one is). a major bonus would be a tv out so i dont have the hastle of getting my atis tv out to work .

Cost as always is a issue, if it costs 200$ more to get the hardware encode, ill do without

Thanks in advance!

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=10907 Oddly we always seem to have clusters of people asking the same FAQ...

That link shows several cards with mpeg-2 encoding, but none with mpeg-4, is mpeg-4 hardware encode not availiable? id rather have 200 hours of good quality, over 100 hours of dvd quality (i dont mind transcoding if i ever want to burn somthing). Also, is it better to get 2 cheaper tuner cards (like AVerMedia TV Tuner Card M179 for $29), or get the pvr500? is it better to get somthing that comes with a remote standard, or get a seperate IR reciver for the remote? Is there some way to tell if the card requires a audio cable to get sound? since ill be using more then one (probably) audio cables are a bad idea, id rather have it all handled by the card/software.

No, it is not available. Did you drill down to the wiki page?

It depends on your priorities. There is no one size fits all answer.

All of the PVR card do it internally. Please, go read the wiki pages linked to in the other thread. They explain all of this stuff, and I spent a bunch of time working on them so I wouldn't have to keep repeating the same answers.

http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=HardwareConfigs
http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=PickingComponents
http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=TVCards

I expect that what many people find frustrating is the mpeg2/mpeg4 dilemma. We all know that mpeg4 can produce reasonably good quality and that it produces much smaller files than mpeg2. We've also been told by innumerable web sites that re-encoding from one lossy format to another is bad for quality.

So, when faced with a lack of mpeg4 hardware encoding (which I'm sure many people would love to have) people get frustrated over what to buy.

Incidentally, a friend of mine has a Windows MCE box connected to his cable box with a firewire cable and he says he's recording flawless quality video directly over that with no capture card or anything. It's probably a topic for another forum, but I'd love to know if anyone is using Mythtv like that to record without any capture card at all. Seems like it's probably a better and cheaper solution than any capture card you could buy.