Well, I spent some time last week doing some research & experiments, and discovered a few things:

  1. Without my set-top box, I am unable to receive above about channel 75 on standard cable
  2. My set-top box is a Pace DC510, and has both a Serial Port & USB port on the back, but I can’t find any information on how to use them.
  3. An IRBlaster is about $20, and seems to be how Tivo communicates with this box, although MythTV Users recommend the MyBlaster instead.
  4. Hauppauge sadly does not carry a card capable of working with Digital cable directly, so I’ll have to interface with the set-top box.
  5. There seem to be issues in the latest MythTV release related to using the PVR-350′s Hardware Decoding, most people are just using software based decoding and XvMC.

So I’ve been doing some thinking, and dug up some old hardware.  I found my old linux machine, an Abit BP6 with dual 533Mhz Celerons and 384M of Ram (256+128).  It’s not a real horse of a machine, but I think that will be ample power for a MythTV if I buy a PVR-250 or PVR-150 to offload the MPEG encoder work.  I’ll also need to buy a hard drive, but that’s pretty cheap.  The system currently has a Geforce4 in it, but I have the Geforce 5900FX that I just removed from my desktop that I could drop in.  I suppose it’s mostly an issue of heat & performance, but I think either one would do fine.  It’s also gonna need a new case if I’m gonna deploy it to the living room, but that can wait until I’ve worked out the kinks.

My greatest fear is that it works wonderfully but fails “The wife test”.  For those of you who don’t know, us geeks collect alot of gadgets that are of wonderous utility and save us hours of work, but our wifes just can’t (or won’t) figure them out.  Skype is one such thing, a great tool that my wife just wouldn’t even consider.  Vonage, on the other hand, has passed the wife test with flying colors.  Can a MythTV pass the wife test?  I honestly don’t know. 
[tag:mythtv][tag:pvr]

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