Forget the PVR 350s. Do you need HD? (more important do you already have a display capable of HD, or $800 to buy one?) If no, than you don't need an HD3000.
You don't even need a PVR 350 (and certainly not two of them). The PVR 250 is what you want unless you feel confident enough to muck about with ivtv drivers to save a few dollars by getting a 150 or 500. You also don't really need the kind of processing power you're taling about. Save some cash and look for something in the neighborhood of a P4 1.8. Get a nice, cheap tower with lots of PCI slots for expansion, big HDDs, and good fans. A cheap generic tower with decent fans will be better in the long run as a backend (and cheaper in the short run as a FE/BE) than a fancy case that looks like it belongs in your entertainment rack. Since the capturing is done in hardware (you are planning to use a PVR card, right?) the processing power is only really needed for transcoding. The difference between your setup and mine (P3 750) is that you'll probably be able to do my eight-hour transcoding job in five hours. I got my CPU (and MB and case) for $140. What's the difference between five and eight hours when you're sleeping? My advice: build a BE/FE first on the cheap. Make sure it works and that MythTV is something you'll want to spend your time and money on (in the case of MythTV, your time is worth a lot). When you know how it works, building the perfect frontend is much more fun (and much less expensive). As far as the minor details like sound go, here's some things to keep in mind: whenever anything's playing or recording, the drives will be spinning; whenever anything's transcoding the CPU will be crunching at full throttle. If you put your backend next to the television, it WILL make noise. You cannot eliminate this. Accept it. Build a functioning system, them you can worry about making a silent frontend (which is possible, because all the noisy bits are on the backend). Good luck _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
