Paging Media Center / PC telly box thing isti

I've got a Duron 1.3 with 768megs of ram and an old Voodoo 3 graphics card.
If I shove a tuner card in it, am I going to be able to get it working as a
media center type thing, and still have it working normally for basic web
browsing / torrent grabbing work? It'll not be my main PC, but it'll need to
be tolerably quick. Are there any specific bits of hardware that help with
this sort of work?

 

And I'd not be averse to swapping the graphics card as the V3 is a pain to
set up in Ubuntu, though the mainboard is an old Asus P2B, so it'll not run
anything super modern, as the voltages requirements for cards increased over
time apparently.

 

I suppose so. Hardware encoding sounds like it'd be ideal for what I want.
The machines' got a few hard drives in it, and can run some flavour of RAID
(though it is a shite highpoint chipset), and has a matching pair of 80 gig
drives, with a seperate drive that could be used for booting and "normal"
data storage

 

Check out mythtv to see if it supports your hardware. You can download
pre-configured versions (eg mythdora) that you can use to quickly check
if your hardware works.

HTH

 

Is there a tv guide database freely available for the UK then?

 

IIRC, mythtv uses a similar input format as GB-PVR, which accepts
programme information in XML format, generated from XMLTV, XMLTV-GUI, or
similar.

Those utilities can grab their information from a number of sources,
including (but not limited to) radiotimes.com, which is free.

 

If you use a Freeview card then mythtv can use the over the air guide
that freeview broadcasts.

 

If it's any help, I'm using a Hauppauge WinTV card (analogue) I got used for
10 quid with my old 500MHz, 392MB Athlon and it plays fine provided i dont'
do many other things at the same time. I can't tel you what recording is
like as I haven't tried it.

Sound is a bit of a pain, as I'm using USB speakers and the TV-card won't
speak to them (geddit?....)

Geo

 

Do any of the cards take the MPEG stream from Freeview and just dump it
straight onto the hardrive? That'd seem like the most sane option to me,
rather than spending CPU time decompressing and then re-encoding something.
I assume that'd result in loss of quality, though I have naff all
understanding of how MPEG works...

 

I can't see why not. The programme is transmitted as an MPEG, so why can't
it just be pushed on to the hard drive as the same MPEG?

That seems to be contrary to what the MythTV faq says, although they may be
talking about Analogue telly.

 

Any particular cards you'd recommend for such things?