I am leaning towards an HTPC for my PJ. My question is can the software (for example MythTV, SageTV, BeyondTV) easily switch between recording over the AIR HD content and standard sattelite or digital cable channels?

In other words could I schedule the PVR to record Lost on an over the air HD channel but to also record some stuff off of Nickelodeon on my digital cable?

I would assume maybe I would have to purchase 2 capture cards. One with HD support and the other could just be a cheap one (for the standard resolution digital cable channels)

Is this the way it would work?

If you want them to record at the same time, yes. different times, then no, they should be able to both be recorded by the HD card (as long as your HD card has an analog tuner in it as well as a digital tuner)

I use MCE2005 with the ATI HD wonder as my only card, and it does just fine. i love it. I dont' have cable, i watch OTA HD only. enough channels for me. When i DID have cable, tho, it changed channels just fine.

I just got my HTPC built. Here are two different PVR applications that are FREE.


Got All Media

gbpvr

They both support multiple tuner cards and both can use ffdshow. I am leaning towards GBPVR. The forums are more active so the support is better.

I was leaning towards SageTV because the wife wants the "Tivo" as she calls it to be available from multiple TVs. Sage sells the "media extender" for $100 which is cheaper than getting a whole new PC for each TV i want to connect to my media server. Those other solutions are sweet though, i wasn't even aware of them in my searches. I thought Myth was the only free one.

Oh and sage meets my requirements of running on linux. I want to put this on an old P3 and don't have the power for a windows based program

I believe GBPVR also supports the media extenders. The Hauppage MVP is the one they support. I am not sure about Got All Media.

I personally run Meedio on all of my TVs plus my projector now, you might want to check that out too, www.meedio.com

How do you run the meedio on additional TVs without additional computers?

I get complete P4 2.0 gig computers with TV out video cards for free all day long at work so my situation is kind of unique. To be honest Meedio isn't really even setup to do networking, I just share the folders on my main computer (has the biggest hard drive array) and map drives to it on the others. I trick the the install of Meedio on the other computers to use these mapped drives.

I've used pretty much every different pvr software out there and by far Mythtv is the best. Its just a question of how good you are at hacking around with linux... I get around the gaming issue by haveing a second HD that I can just swap out with the linux drive (swap enclosures) and bam I'm back into windows. Also its totally designed for having multiple clients throughout the house. I'm currently running frontends on my crt projector, my xbox for a standard 32" tv, and two more clients are upstairs used by my roomates. The backend/frontend combo for the crt projector is an overclocked 3200+ amd 64 with a geforce fx5300 pci-e card running all content in 720p (but soon to be 1080p when I get my wuxga projector finished)

If you are only going to have one computer as a media pc, then I'd try the free route with Media Portal which is windows compatible. Do a google search. its loosly based off xbox media center and is advancing at a super quick pace (open sourced project) and has extremely active forums and a lot of plugins. I'm keeping my eye on it myself. When they start getting client features available like live tv and a backend/frontend system like myth I may make the jump over to it just for ease of use.

personaly, I'm digging gbprv for my software of choice. don't get me wrong I love linux. but everyone knows that some hardware isn't supported yet.

I hate to say it but sometime winxp has some benfits.

It sounds to me like MythTV would be good for you. You can literally change tuners with the push of a button. You can also run a master backend (the part that does the actual recording/storing) on a single machine and multiple front ends (the part you get to look at) using networked cheap PCs since all they really do is display (you just need one with a TV-out of some sort).

I use MythTV at home and it was pretty easy to set up if you use relatively common hardware. Its a little overly-powerful if you're just going to use it on one PC (which is what I do and I will probably be switching to freevo) but if you want a central repository for TV recordings its great. Only one set of tuners required and a couple of cheap, slow PCs with TV-outs.

I am using myth mainly for the HD capability it has. I currently have two avermedia a180 cards and it totally rocks with QAM tuning. For analog I just use a pvr-500 and then I use the cable box with a pvr-150 for the digital encrypted channels I can't get through anything else channels 100 to 127 and some of the HD channels that are encrypted farther up the spectrum
its hard to beat having an excellent pvr like myth with HD on most of the tv's in the house. You do need powerful hardware and you have to be willing to spend a few days getting the bugs out, but once you do its pretty easy to maintain. Right now i'm adding a second software Raid 5 array using some really cheap 250GB seagate sata-2 drives This will put my storage at close to 3TB (3.8 or so if you include raid 5 overhead) with this much space I can record around 400 to 500 hours of HD 1080i content (8GB-12GB per hour) in mpeg 2 or 1000hrs of HD content in mpeg 4. What dvr out there can do that?

I have been using MediaPortal for over a year and am blown away by it's features and the price can't be beat (Free). They have 5 to 10 SVN updates a week so the support is unmatched. They have one of the most active user forums as well. I have tried most of the other PVR programs available including MS MCE and they have all fallen short in my opinion. It has been tested with 7 TV cards with minimal impact on the CPU load. To check this test out click here.

The latest incarnation just released is MediaPortal TVServer with some pretty impressive features.

# Separation between front-end and back-ends
# Supports multiple clients
# Supports multiple tv-servers
# real-time streaming of radio/tv to clients
# Supports analog h/w cards
# Supports DVB-C / DVB-T / DVB-S / ATSC (BDA drivers)
# Supports Skystar 2
# Supports CI/CAM interface for FireDtv/FloppyDtv/Twinhan and TechnoTrend
# Multi-tuner support
# xml tv import of EPG data
# Grabbing EPG data directly from the DVB streams
# Recording/timeshifting/placeshifting
# Recording to real .mpg mpeg-2 format
# Teletext
# Plugins

To view the info on the MediaPortal TVServer click here.

To find our more info on MediaPortal click here.

Just my 2 cents,