I've been lerking and reading and absorbing as much as I can and now I must come out of the shadows to ask a few questions that must be too obvious because no one else has asked them. You guys seem to be the most friendly and informative, and the Knoppmyth project sounds like a dream come true.

Let me get up front with my situation.

Old PC being used:
AMD 1.3ghz Tbird (MSI K7T Turbo mobo)
512MB PC133 Ram
GeForce 4 Ti4200 (for TV-out)
10 GB HD for OS
20 GB HD for Storage

Cable: Comcast Digital Plus Ultra Mega Deluxe Platinum or whatever the hell they're calling it now.

Linux Expertise: Ran it for a bit as a desktop, worked with it a little as a server. Not really expert but I can manage most mundane and trivial issues with ease.

What my rig does: Nothing, dude I'm scared... I've read so many horror stories in the last 2 days... I need a hug.

What I want my rig to do:
I'd like to turn this old clunker into the heart of a decent home threater with full PVR functionality, as well as Divx and (s)VCD playback for stuff I download off usenet (mostly out-of-region/country stuff I can't get locally and record myself). I also need to be able to record old VHSes for archival to DVD. (DVD burner on seperate machine)

So okay, off the bat I obviously need a tuner or encoder card. My roomate has an old WinTV card from like '99 lying around somewhere I might try to use. Since I only have 20 gigs for storage I'd like to encode in Divx or some other really small compression, without sacrificing too much quality (in case I wish to share my recordings with others). Will the old 1.3ghz Tbird be able to cope with that on the fly or should I invest in a PVR-250 to do MPEG encoding? (Does that do MPEG1?)

Okay once I get that out of the way, my next dilema is how do I wire it all up? I've got a Comcast Digital Reciever, do I just attach a Coax splitter on the line before hits that or on it's output? I'd like to be able to record something while watching something else on live TV, and be able to watch live TV in general with ease. I guess my main question here is will a tuner card be able to deal with Digital cable signals without going through the converter box so that I can just flip on my TV as normal and plug in the channel with the comcast remote when I want to catch some news?

How much more of a pain in the ass is it going to be to get it to record from a VCR to Mpeg2 so I can archive my VHS tapes?

And last but not least I don't really want to spend a lot of time trying to hack linux just to get it working, I'm a lover not a hacker... Is this the entirely wrong platform for me and I should look at a Windows solution instead?

Big thanks in advance guys, you all seem amazingly helpful here.

The CPU should be able to cope. Configure MythTV to record using MPEG-4, I've used it in the past and was very happy w/ the results. You may have to play w/ the encoding options(bitrate, etc) to get the file size does.

If you decide on a 250 later on, you can transcode to MPEG-4.

I've never capture old VHS -> MPEG2, so I don't know how difficult that will be...

You probably want to use and IRBlaster or if your cable box allows, control it via serial port.

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!