Here's my current MythTV set-up:
- Hauppauge 350 card
- Hauppauge 500 card
- Random motherboard with onboard video (Intel GMA series)
- 2 GB RAM
- 120GB Harddrive
- AMD Sempron processor
- Ethernet (not wireless)
For the US cable system I prefer cable that doesn't require a decoder box. If your cable requires a box then you'll have to buy/make something to let MythTV change the channel on the box and you'll be restricted to recording/watching one channel at a time (unless you can get multiple boxes).
My experience with the 350 has been okay. Having it output to a standard TV well is difficult. You can avoid that with a modern TV that accepts VGA-in so all your video comes from a graphics card.
It looks like HD video support is working its way towards Linux, but I do not have any experience with that hardware.
Some of the guides get into a lot of detail on how you partition your harddrive. There is a quantifiable performance difference with the file systems. But if you don't notice than it doesn't matter.
Tonight I plan on hooking a wireless bridge to by Myth box. I've had some bad experiences with Linux and PCI wireless cards; I'm avoiding that with the Ethernet to wireless bridge.
Bottomline: Hauppauge SD card(s) with a modern processor, decent RAM, a modern harddrive, motherboard with an Intel GMA graphics chipset and networking that Linux recognizes will be more than enough for a MythTV backend. The default Mythbuntu set-up is working fine for me.
I need a cable box to get some of the higher numbered channels, any examples of how to set something up to change the channels on it? – Jared – 2009-07-16T02:00:41.913
I haven't done it. But here's where I'd look: http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Using_an_IR_Blaster_with_MythTV
– Will – 2009-07-16T02:18:59.723