OK to pick your brain a on a few more things -
I know costs can vary but say you bought a single video-capture board that did the digital encoding in hardware - but also including the case, the cpu, the memory, the HD, the video card etc. etc. how much are we talking roughly? It seems like you could easily get into the $500 - $1000 range for a functionality that I lease a box from my cable company for about $5 a month that is small and relatively quiet. I realize that having an open system has numerous advantages - basicallly you own the 1's and 0's unlike in the cable model but still :)
Also, say I have digital cable - so I still have a STB between the cable and the mythTV right? So how does mythTV select channels on the STB when it wants to record a certain channel at a certain time?
Thanks.
Okay....first off, I am running my Myth box on a P-III 933 Mhz, with 512 MB RAM and a 60GB HDD. It was my main computer before I bought another one about a year ago. I did nothing to it except to install an ATI-AIW video card, which was in an even older system I had. I could have bought or built a similar system in the $300-$400 range. There is no need for anything fancy. The only 'must-have's' are the A/V in/out capable video card, and a minimum P-III processor or any other processor that isn't chopped.
The Myth box becomes your programming source. In essence, it gets all of it's info from your cable or satellite tuner, but it takes over all functionality. The guide, programming, info, etc is taken from your tuner and incorporated into the Myth system, and will therefore be run completely by the Myth system. When you watch TV, your interface will be the Myth system and not the cable or sat tuner.