New Setup - How shall I do this?

[Oxyg3n]

Greetings all. After reading posts on TGB and here, I've decided i know enough to actually venture down this route. This is my idea of the setup I would like. I have to build a PC and I dont know the rough specs to actually build it, so I need your guys help. I have ordered 3 FloppyDTV Cards, and 3 Blue Zeta CAMs with the Joker 0.79 firmware and 10 funcard 4's (no sure why 10, but it was a deal on ebay) and if all goes well i will prolly end up installing another 3 I have 4 rooms in this house that I will end up plunging Extenders in (so the PC with the TV cards will become a headless machine i put under the stairs) (Thats why i will have 6 tuners aswell, 4 for viewing TV and 2 to record) So with any luck, how much pressure will this put on the CPU/RAM and given my expansion options I have in mind, what sort of PC should I build. Either way, the PC will have 4 1TB drives put in, as to become a whole media hub for my DVDs/XViDs/DiVXs/x264's/h264's So can any of you guys give me any suggestions? Thanks in advance Oxyg3n

[Cafe.Rcaer]

Hi - you found the right place

3 FDTV's! Crikey. 6 - jeez.

On their own the 3 FDTV's won't make much of an impact on a PC's performance, but the extender side will. Unfortunately, I don't know much about this side.

I understand there is a 2 tuner type limit in Home Premium and 4 in Ultimate, that is, you can have 2 tuners of each type, DVB-T, DVB-S, Analogue. Not sure how/what you would do if you wanted to use WHS.

You probably know that this is hackable in VMC, but not (yet) in the TV Pack. Also, I know Digital Everywhere are looking at how to avoid using the fake drivers in the TV Pack, or at least looking at getting the cards to pretend to be something else other than DVB-T so you can run 2xFDTV and 2xReal DVB-T in one system.

So, long and short - the only advice I can give is "Go Big" on your processor!

[Oxyg3n]

Well... My initial idea was to have a Dual core of some kind.

Then I thought hmm it cant be much more expensive to go for something on the AMD Phenom range (mainly there quad core CPU's)

I currently run Vista Ultimate, i was dabbling with the idea of moving to a WHS since that would benifit my network (and hopefully) aswell as meet my TV needs. I have one slight question though. If this setup was to go ahead.

Is it possible to turn the Windows Media Centre in Vista (any version that supports it) into an Extender, rather then install a TV Card into each PC, then have the PC share the data across the network to the WHS

[Cafe.Rcaer]

No, not possible from what I know. I'm not into WHS, but I've seen lots of people asking the same question.

I've got a vauge feeling that Media Portal can do this, though.

The other thing that you *might* have a problem with is disk speed - Media Center streams everything to disk, then plays back from there, so with 6 FDTVs you might have a problem.

I have two running on a fairly modest PC (AMD 4050e) and it's fine, so I would suggest three would be okay. 6 though, who knows.

Your issue is the number of tuners VMC will support, I think you will want the TV Pack, if nothing else because "they" broadcast the Audio Narrative in the same stream (even though there are separate channels) so I used to get the Narrative for the visually impared playing and no way to turn it off. The TV Pack allows you to select which stream to use, so you can turn the narrative off. Teletext and Interactive are "nice" too.

You will need Vista Ultimate, and the TV Pack, which will limit you to 4 tuners (of one type) unless Digital Everywhere come up with a solution. I would go this way and see what happens, if the limit on number of tuners doesn't get hacked/resolved, you'll be as well running other PCs with tuners in them OR just hoping that 4 tuners is enough...