[mythtv-users] Best hardware to build dual tuner? (HD(QAM) + Analogue, but run out of slots)

[kminney at telus.net]

This is my first post to this forum, so hopefully it makes sense and there is 
someone out there that can help me.

I have a MythTV system which I have been building for a few months now. I 
started out by buying two Airstar HD5000 PCI capture cards. This worked great 
for HD which I could receive using clear QAM, however I was only able to get 
four SD channels. Subsequently I discovered that these are on free trial and 
are unencrypted. The rest of the SD channels are transmitted as encrypted 
digital or analogue NTSC (unencrypted).

My aim was to build a dual tuner HD+NTSC(analogue from cable) system but now I 
have a problem as my Airstar cards take up one PCI slot each and I only have 
two PCI slots on my Asus M2NPV-VM motherboard. I have no slots left to add an 
analogue capture card.

I am trying to find a solution which will allow me to capture simultaneously 
using all combinations of the two tuners, i.e. SD+SD, SD+HD, HD+HD

The only options I can see are to add a HD Homerun for the HD and have a couple 
of analogue capture cards in the PCi slots, but then I end up having four cable 
connectors to hang on my cable and also my Airstar cards would be redundant.

Another option would be to have two pcHDTV HD-5500 cards, however I am 
concerned that it doesn't do compression of the analogue NTSC on-board and I 
worry that my AMD 3500 AM2 is not going to be powerful enough. Also, this would 
make my Airstar cards redundant which is looking like being inevitable now 
anyway :-(

Another concern I have about the HD-5500 is how do I get the audio for the 
analogue NTSC from the two cards? The pcHDTV spec indicates that there is a 
audio jack, which I have to hook up to my sound card - but how do I connect the 
analogue jacks from two HD-5500 cards into one input of my sound card?

I did read a post to the pcHDTV forums that suggested that the audio jack was a 
limitation which has been addressed in later revisions of the card - by this I 
assume it means that the cable is no longer required and the audio is 
transmitted across the PCI interface somehow. I have sent a message to pcHDTV 
support and await their response.

I have also found some other cards that look like they have the potential to do 
what I need hardware-wise but I don't think that they are supported by MythTV ..

AVerMedia AverTV M780 (not supported in Linux) 
V-Box Catseye 164e (have read of windows users having problems with this card, 
not sure about Linux support) 
Hauppauge HVR-1600 (indications however that it doesn't do QAM)

Does anyone have any suggestions on the best way to approach this?

thanks,

Kevin