cheap HD recorder setup

[badkuk]

peeps, planning to set up an HD recorder para sa bahay. malamang it would be Athlon based, around 256mb RAM, 160gb disk space.

i've had my eye on the Leadtek Winfast PVR2000 for quite some time now; its hardware MPEG-2 encoder is supposed to bear the brunt of the encoding chores, so i'm expecting i can get away with entry level CPU and RAM resources.

however, there are quite a few tv tuners that do "real-time" MPEG-4 already to my understanding, "real time" doesn't necessarily mean it's hardware based, so the brunt of the work will be on the CPU.

expect ko naman 90% of the time the box will be used for recording purposes. which tv tuner card do you think i should get? ung MPEG-2 encoding, pwede namang iconvert to MPEG-4/whatever afterwards via software, di ba? ubos lang nga kaagad ung disk space mo

tia

[ghosthunter]

peeps, planning to set up an HD recorder para sa bahay. malamang it would be Athlon based, around 256mb RAM, 160gb disk space.

i've had my eye on the Leadtek Winfast PVR2000 for quite some time now; its hardware MPEG-2 encoder is supposed to bear the brunt of the encoding chores, so i'm expecting i can get away with entry level CPU and RAM resources.

however, there are quite a few tv tuners that do "real-time" MPEG-4 already to my understanding, "real time" doesn't necessarily mean it's hardware based, so the brunt of the work will be on the CPU.

expect ko naman 90% of the time the box will be used for recording purposes. which tv tuner card do you think i should get? ung MPEG-2 encoding, pwede namang iconvert to MPEG-4/whatever afterwards via software, di ba? ubos lang nga kaagad ung disk space mo
tia

you might be surprised at what you can do with a computer with the proper parts.

The VHS-PC:

http://www.gadgets.ph/tech/showthread.php?t=3673

Main use of this is to playback video files I download from the internet (from a another PC setup just for downloading ******* files). But a simple addition of a tv tuner card will give it the ability to record tv shows as well.

Currently, the original P3-800 motherboard has died and replaced with with a AMD Sempron 2600+ processor & Redfox motherboard. I'm planning to replace the old 3.5inch HDD with a 2.5in HDD to make more internal space for either the slim dvd-cdrw combo drive or tv-tuner card or both.