[mythtv-users] Recommended Hardware for MythTV

[Jon Waite]

I've had a search through the list archives, but can't really find anything
appropriate for this apart from some vague recommendations on CPU speed.

I've like to build a machine to act as a MythTV backend connected to my
digital satellite decoder for recording / viewing via TV and also to serve
live and/or recorded video to my home PC network.

Ideally I'd like to build a small form factor machine based on a microATX
motherboard / case with a PVR-350 card for capture and TV-Out (and hardware
MPEG-2 encoding/decoding). Does anyone have specific recommendations for
CPU/Motherboard combinations (microATX size) that work well with MythTV ?
Any to avoid ? I'd like to use an onboard RAID 0 stripe across 2 IDE hard
drives for performance and capacity, but haven't seen any microATX
motherboards with onboard RAID 0, so any recommendations for PCI RAID 0 IDE
cards that work well with Linux ?

I'd also appreciate any recommendations for which Linux distribution to use
in this environment, I'm already fairly familiar with Debian and Mandrake,
but have never really got to grips with video in X. Recompiling code, device
modules and kernels is no problem though.

Would also appreciate hearing from any other MythTV users in New Zealand,
particularly with regards to whether schedule information is available in a
form that is useable by MythTV for satellite channels ?

Thanks in advance for any help / recommendations.

Apologies if this is all documented already somewhere and I've missed it, if
so please forgive me and provide a link.

Jon.