Building a PVR....Where to Start?

["Mark Golledge" <markgolledge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Morning Guys,

Hope you might be able to help.

I want to build a PVR (i.e. ability to pause and re-wind live TV) and need
some helpful direction.

At the moment I've got an Xbox running XBMC (near to our aerial in) and
computer under the stairs (quite a distance away) running Windows XP but
which is LAN connected to a router. They both connect wirelessly to each
other and am really pleased with the results. There is something missing
though and that is the ability to watch, record and pause live TV.

Unfortunately the computer under the stairs is pretty slow:

Intel Pentium III 600Mhz
512MB RAM
100GB Memory via 3 hard drives (most of which is already full and the
computer won't cope with anything larger at the moment)
Motherboard: SE440BX-3 AA722396-112

In a perfect world I'd have a decent spec computer running (quitely) near
the Xbox and could then have the xbox as my front-end and the computer as
the backend.

However, it doesn't seem as though that could be possible so I am thinking
about building a small, quiet PVR to place next to the Xbox still using
XBMC
(if there is a plugin) as the front-end. Initial thoughts were MythTV as
there is a front-end for the xbox but then I know this runs on Linux and
everything else at home is Windows based.

I need some ideas both in terms of hardware and OS if possible as I'd like
to use the Xbox as the front-end (and links to websites if possible).

By the way, money is an issue so the cheaper the better!

Thanks in advance,


Mark



--

Mark Golledge
E: mark@xxxxxxx
W: www.markgolledge.com


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