[TriLUG] MythTV box recommendations?

[Magnus]

I've done MythTV off & on as my spare hardware allows.  Right now my 
Myth infrastructure is down.

I never did like the quality of the picture from analog capture cards. 
However, the digital capture devices like the HDHomeRun delivered 
beautiful picture quality.

You'll get a much better recording of local channels with a half decent 
over the air antenna. Time Warner is recompressing the local channels 
and they look awful in comparison.

Other than the local channels, pretty much all of the digital channels 
on Time-Warner were encrypted QAM last time I checked. You can get a "HD 
firewire tuner" (just a set top box with one tuner, no PVR functions) 
from T-W which will decrypt the channels & send them over a firewire 
port as MPEG2. Some channels like ESPN & HBO, etc are going to  be 
blacked out but a lot of the other standard cable channels should work 
just fine.

With the current version of MythTV, you can use a dual core Intel Atom 
based system board with nVidia ION chipset. This is a killer combination 
for a front end box. See http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/VDPAU for more on 
how this works.