I had a coax cable running from the front room to the office where I was building my MythTV box. I tripped over the cable on the way to the kitchen and yanked the coax connector off the PVR-150 card installed in the machine in the office. (very ashamed of himself)

My question is, can the MPEG encoder portion of the card, assuming it is still functional at all, be used in conjunction with another capture card that doesn't have a built-in MPEG encoder (one that uses software encoding)? I have seen talk of using seperate decoder cards for decoding so it doesn't tie up the CPU.

I am assuming each card in a Knoppmyth/MythTV system would require it's own coax connection (signal coming in) right? If not, again assuming the rest of the card is functional, could i just get another PVR-150 and then be able to record two shows at once with only the new card having an input signal? I am thinking not on this one but the first question seems like it should work in theory.

Ashamedly yours,
Sektion9

No, because the ability to record two shows at once requires two TUNERS. The fact that you have two encoders doesn't help.

Since you've effectively killled your one PVR-150's ability to tune, your only option is to use its composite video input with some external tuner (a VCR, a cable box, etc.). But then you have to get into IR blasting to get MythTV to change the channel.

I did something similar...overtightened the coax to the tuner and broke it off. I've been able to use the card for the composite input OK though. Until recently when I got a plextor for that purpose.