My roommate won an hdtv at his work's halloween costume contest (nice prize, huh?....he was richard simmons, and yes, he danced), so now im looking to add hdtv to our mythbox.

I am looking at the pcHDTV card, since that looks to be most compatible.

CURRENT HARDWARE
Right now the box is running on an intel celeron 1.8ghz w/ 256mb ram, and a 200gb hard drive. My tuner is a pvr-250 running through analog comcast. Is that going to be enough to handle the new hard and HD?

Also, i was thinking about adding another 400gb hard drive or something even larger to store more hd stuff. Is this something that myth will detect automatically (i'd be surprised). Would it be easier for a linux noob such as myself to just re-install knoppmyth (which my god, just keeps getting better and better) when i drop in the new hard drive and the new card?

Will knoppmyth be able to automatically detect and configure 2 hard drives and 2 tuners?

That CPU is probably not enough to do HD. I have heard 3.2 is about the limit for good HD playback.

If you have a NVIDIA card with XVMC support, you may be able to make HD work forr you. You can use the Nvidia video card for hardware accellerated playback, so you don't need so much CPU power. XVMC capable cards can be found pretty cheap I think.

As for picking up cards, knoppmyth autoconfigured a pcHDTV and a PVR 500 card for me easily.

Not so sure about 2 hard drives, the easy install blows away your first HD and dumps 10 GB / and the rest in /myth for video storage. You could add the second HD and mount that as /myth/tv for video storage and use the rest of your first HD for ripped DVDs, audio, etc.... Which is what I plan to do one day.

See the LVM writeup on the wiki for adding the second HD. Or, just mount the new one under /myth/tv

The second option is easier, but you'd have over 500GB for recordings if you use the LVM option.

How are you connecting to the TV? You need an nVidia 6200 or so, for HD. If you are using sVideo through the PVR card, that won't be HD. You need either component, VGA, or DVI. If the TV has VGA input, that may be an easy option.

And as Ed pointed out, the CPU is too light for HD. But you may be able to record HD and then transcode it, and watch in DVD quality.

Thanks for the quick feedback!

1) I belive my card is a: GAINWARD VGFMX4000DT GeForce MX4000 128MB DDR AGP 4X/8X Video Card. And a quick googling suggests that can support XVMC playback.

2) I will look at the wiki about adding the new harddrive

3) Right now i am connecting via s-video from the video card, but i could just as easily use the DVI connector. I dont think the tv has VGA, but isn't DVI just as good?

4) so what should be on my shopping list then? 3.2ghz chip? bigger hard drive? do i need to get a new video card or can that handle it?

Also, since i am pretty reliant on the knoppmyth auto-install, should i just bank on a re-install of knoppmyth to do this? would that be my best bet?

#3 - DVI will definitely be HD, and since it's a new set, it may work nicely. Some older sets (like mine) don't like to talk to PCs via DVI.

The KM auto-install won't do anything at all with your second drive. See the wiki.