Due to the fact that my condo association sucks, I do not have cable connection in my upstairs bedroom. I have an extra pc thats a 1.4ghz, 512mb ram, generic video card, and ATI TV wonder PCI. I'm curious how easy it would be to setup a myth tv backend with this machine. Using an xbox upstairs as a frontend in order to transfer my cable tv upstairs. Just curious what else I might need hardware wise or software?

Thanks in advance,
Squeeky

All sounds pretty workable.

One of the big questions is how are you planning to network it together? If you're going to run network cable you could just as easily run coax. If you're planning on wireless you need to use the fastest version to have enough bandwidth and low enough latency.

Search the wiki for more info on using an Xbox as a frontend and BE/FE hardware setup.

I looked into the xbox-as-frontend approach and read up on the steps required to get it to boot linux to run the xbox specific mythtv stuff. It seemed like a big pain in the rear...

-brendan

My plans were to use my existing G wireless, or possibling a Powerline ehternet bridge. They are rated for upto 14mbps. Or G at 54mbps

G should be fast enough if it flows smoothly. Try a ping test to see if you're losing packets on the wirelss.

I use an xbox over 802.11g with fairly little trouble. Be aware, that right now the maintainer of the xbox debs for myth is out of town and there is no .18 version available. So if you plan to do this now, then you will have some extra difficulty in getting it working.
My only other suggestion would be to turn the mplayer cache up a bit on the front end so it buffers a little more and avoids skipping due to latency. Mine is nearly 2 seconds, but I prefer this over the skipping problem. Don't be discouraged by the xbox modification. I did a simple HD swap method and installed Xebian. It was quick and pretty painless, but then again I don't have a single game for it, so I don't know what trouble it is to play games and use it as a frontend. I bought the xbox just for a frontend.
Good luck, if you need help setting up the xbox, I can try and find by old links.