> Recording TV normally needs a hardware encoder I believe, > I think you are looking at 250pounds for an analogue encoder Excessive. You can record live tv happily with an analogue bt878 card and a decent Duron using something like ffmpeg or mythtv. The better the CPU the more compression you can get. > Time shifting would possibly be even harder without hardware mpeg2 > encoders, unless you only want a short period of time shift and don't > bother with much compresssion. Time shifting while recording is within the abilities of a decent duron too. > Hardware they always have nice ideas at mini-itx.com but these are not > fast machines and can only just do software decoding. EPIA-M has hardware mpeg2 engines for playback but not yet full Linux support for them. If that is fixed my guess is that the ideal combination becomes an EPIA-M with a WinTV PVR 250 or a free to air digital tv card. That would give you hardware mpeg2 all around. > If you come up with any ideas / a workable solution I think we all want > one.
