Ok I have been doing research on what to go with for my HTPC setup.

I was initially interested in BeyondTV 4
but MythTV is a good choice too.

It seems like these programs only capture over the air HD channels, I am not really sure what that limits us to.

What service would be optimal for HD programming to enable me to "tivo" HD programming.

A sattelite dish? Digital Cable with firewire connection?

Also I was hoping to repurpose an old pentium III for my setup. My understanding is that if I get a capture card which has hardware encoding I will be able to accomplish this. My concern is that I might need a biefier machine just to simply play the content (encoding aside).

Any direction would be appreciated.

Im not up to snuff fully on HD capture with a PC, but wouldnt you need a capable machine to even bring the content in (for the capture).

Your right about the encoding process, a weaker machine can do it, it would just take longer.

I did some research on this a while back, but put it on the back burner becasue I had too much other stuff going on, and i'm still saving money for everything I want. I even went so far as to install myth tv on my pc (without a capture card) so I could mess around with linux, but without another machine to get on the net, it was hard to look for help.

If you want HD, you can get an HD tuner card, which would let you record over the air hd signals. Most major networks broadcast in hd and sd at the same time. You will need to get an antenna for this to work, and it seems like the old school outdoor roof antenna are better than an inside rabbit ear antenna.

Now if you want to get hbo, showtime, espn, and other non broadcast channels in hd you will have to call your cable/satallite company and sign up/get an HD box. This will now do the tuning for you. Then you would have to get an HD capture card, which isin't cheap, bacisally this puts it out of the feasable cost range for now. SamuariJack was looking for one recently and I dont think he found one for under 1000. ouch.
If you could find an HD capture card, you would also need an IR repeater so the pc could change the channel on the cable box. then you would do all the tv watching thru the pc.

Another option is to get a dvr from a cable/satallite company. It can record any channels you want, including hd. I have a scientific atlantic 8300hd, but I wouldnt recommend it. PM me if you want to hear me rant about its bad user interface

As for decoding, if you get a video card that can do hardware MPEG-2 decoding you should be fine.
The encoder card will do hardware encoding to MPEG-2, and now your videocard can do hardware decoding of the MPEG-2 saved on the disk. The only thing your cpu has to handle is the scheduling, and the user interface.
If you have an xbox laying around you could install linux and myth-tv on that also.
The frontend for myth tv was ported to the xbox, and works pretty well because with a mod'ed xbox you can get hd output. Im just not sure how much the xbox can handle in terms of decoding. It may or may not be able to decode hd shows, but i think it can do 720p.


http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showt...threadid=151443

Hmm I wonder how much that series 3 tivo will cost.

Overall your options seem to be
1) get a directivo / dvr from your cable company. Easiest to setup, but cable company dvrs usually lack in features that real tivo have, and lack the flexability of home made setups.
2) setup a htpc with a hardware recorder, you can now record over the air hd, and regular cable channels. Get a video card with a hardware mpeg2 decoder to lighten the load on the cpu, and even possibly add additional computers or xboxs for frontends.
3) wait for series 3 tivo

I would go with #2 or option #3. But if you are going to wait for the series 3 tivo to come out, might as well get a cable dvr in the mean time. Just check and make sure your cable company will be able to provide Cablecards when the tivo comes out, otherwise it is useless.

Thanks for the great reply. This is just what I expected to be the case. I am going to have to do some research and see what the over the air coverage on HD content is.

I still think I will use the P3 as an HTPC because the wife wants the DVR to be available on multiple TVs in the house so she can watch stuff while I am watching basketball for example. I think I have settled on a sagetv.com machine due to the box they sell for 100 bucks that allows you to hook into the server on multiple TVs. Sage Media Extender

Here is a question... does basic digital cable (non-hd) come through in a higher resolution than standard analog tv?

http://ask.pvrblog.com/2004/10/a_true_hdtv_htp.html

I thought this was a good link for anyone else interested in this topic. It has links to many of the higher end solutions out right now.

I don't think so. Digital cable just lets the cable provider compress the signal, so they can cram more channels of crap thru the same cable.
My company likes to over compress channels sometimes, its pretty sad. I shouldn't have to see blocky mpeg compression artifacts when watching movies on hbo.
its not very common, but on some of the secondary hbo channels, and other digital cable channels I can notice the over compression.