Hi there guys and girls,

I am interested in setting up a DVR for my home in the upcoming months, and I am hoping the gathered knowledge and experience of this forum can help me avoid some of the pitfalls.

Before I go too much further, I have to make it clear that at this point in time I am only interested in Standard Definition DVB. My television is a 68cm CRT Sony and I am sure all the wonder and magesty of HD would be lost. I am more interested in the time-shifting capabilities of a PVR, rather than the digital broadcasting. But hey, if digital is there and I can use it, why not?

I was thinking of the following setup:

Intel PIII 933Mhz
256MB RAM
40GB HDD
1 x Dvico FusionHDTV DVB-T1 Plus
1 x Dvico FusionHDTV DVB-T1 Lite
1 x nVidia FX5200 128MB DDR DVI/TV

Having lurked in the forums for a while now, it seems the component that causes the most trouble is the DVB capture cards. Keeping in mind I live in Australia and my access to hardware appears to be slightly more limited to those in the US and Europe, are the Dvico cards a good investment? They are cheaper than the Hauppauge Nova-T and seem to be stocked by most component sellers.

I have also seen the Avermedia DVB-T, DVB-T 771, and DVB-T 777. These cards seem to be the cheapest. Which of the 3 would anyone recommend?

Is the 933Mhz CPU adequate? Will the MPEG-2 decoder on the nVidia graphics card handle the decoding of the recorded video streams?

Thanks for any advise you can provide.

A..

I don't think the 933 is going to be adequate. I have an Athlon XP1700 and it runs at about 50% to 70% Usage displaying standard def PAL DVB. I recently reinstalled and did some processor usage investigation. Running at around 90% causes problems.

You can use xvmc so your graphics card does the decoding (in which case the processor would probably do) but it comes with its own problems from what I have heard.

The dvico cards have caused problems in the past, but as far as I know, they all work with the stock kernel as of 2.6.13. I believe this will be the kernel in the next release (but until then, it is easy to compile it for R5A16).

The dvico remote is nice too.

And that hard disk is going to look awfully small awfully quick.

Supergreentriange.

I run DVB with a P3 733 and XVMC (i.e. NVidia assisted mpeg2 decoding). It works just fine. You can even run software mpeg2 decoding instead of XVMC on a 933 and it should work fine. On a 733 it's just a touch too slow to software decode. Because you are capturing a MPEG2 data stream, it hardly uses any CPU to capture (pretty much streams to HDD from the DVB card).

Hope that helps.
Simon