[mythtv-users] MythTV - DirectTV - Grabbing Streams

[Jeff M.]

Hello,
    Here's what I would like to do.  I'm going to build a test MythTV system
for our company.  The purpose of this will be to save basketball games to CD
or DVD for later review when the player is on the road or at home, etc.
    There a pro basketball trainer that my boss is partners with that got
DirecTV and Tivo to record the games of the pro players he trains.  He then
goes through the games on Tivo and records the clips and highlights of the
player to VHS tape.  We then encode the VHS tape using WME and then burn to
DVD/VCD.  These aren't the highest quality and after a lot of DtoA-AtoD
conversion, there is a little bit of a visual problem.
    If we could get the stream digitized just as it's recorded (hack the
Tivo, etc), life would be a lot "gooder".  Anyway, this is where MythTV came
into play.
    What my question is, how hard is it to configure MythTV to control the
DirecTV receiver (one is dual receiver/tivo and another is just the HDTV
receiver (but the channels we're going to be recording aren't HDTV) and I'm
going to test using just the receiver system)?
    And the test system I plan on using is a AMD Duron 1.3, 256MB, 40GB,
GeForce2 GTS 32MB.  I believe it would be best to get a card that has
hardware MPEG-2 encoding.  I've been looking up info and noticed conflicting
reports for the PVR-250.  Does the PVR-250 have hardware MPEG-2 encoding or
do I have to get a PVR-350?
    Thank you for your time and attention.. -Jeff