[mythtv-users] New subscriber Hardware Questions

[mike.minns]

First of all as a new subscriber I'll offer the usual apologies for probably askign a lot of foolish questions that have been asked many times, in my defence I did search the archive first . . .

Anyway I want to create a MythTv to stream live Digital TV through our house.

My, rough, plan is to have a PC with DVB-T card sitting tucked out of the way and running MythTV backend and another PC with a TV-Out card running the knoppix version of MythTV as a frontend. Both linked by 100Mbs ethernet.

As the backend PC isn't going to be the highest spec, currently a PIII 866, 384MB Ram, my understanding is that this might struggle to cope with the load. The frontend PC is a Cyrix 333Mhz 64Mb Ram.

Again my understanding is that the load can be eased by using a DVB-T card with hardware mpeg encoding.

So my questsion are:

1. Are the PCs I have available sound up to the job of running a client-server style digital TV streaming service, or am i doomed to failure.
2. Which DVB-T card to use? I'm currently tempted by a Nebula card, which I believe has hardware encoding, or alternatiively a Hauppauge DEC-2000t set top box with USB connection, which I'm assuming does hardware encoding. The DEc is currently £60 at maplins which seems a good deal, but I haven't seen much about anyone else using one.


I hope this all makes sense, and thanks for advance for any advice.

Mike