SUMMARY: PVR System

Thanks to bishop, Christian Hack and Thomas Heiligenmann for their
responses! My original post is at the end of this message.

Here is the info they provided that I found useful:

MythTV has been shown to record TV very well on Hauppauge wintv cards.

As for cards there are essentially 3 types:
1) Basic analog capture
Look for either BT878 or SAA7134 chipsets. Some of the newer cards have
a Connexant CX???? Which isn't supported under Linux very well yet.
BT878 support is very good and SAA7134 is about 90% there - I had some
sound issues. Both can capture audio through the PCI bus which means
your sound card doesn't need to be full duplex.
2) Hardware MPEG encoders
Haupauge PVR250/350. I have no experience with these but seem to work
quite well under MythTV.
3) DVB-C/S/T
Digital broadcast cards. I have a hauppauge DVB-T and it's driver
support in Linux is new but does work and does capture. Gives a great
picture/sound with no ghosting or interference provide you have a
reasonable aerial.

Be careful with the analog capture cards. Hauppauge in particular had a
card called a WinTV I think which initially had a BT878 chipset but they
then changed it to the connexant CX???? without really telling anyone

Perhaps the "Video Disk Recorder" is exactly what you are looking for?
It has become very popular.
http://www.cadsoft.de/people/kls/vdr/index.htm

-sr

----- Original Message ----- 
Can anyone recommend a PVR system similar to Tivo for Linux that will work
with Directv (satellite)? I would like to set it up to work with my TV (I'm
not looking to watch them on my computer monitor). A search of Freshmeat and
Sourceforge turned up a few that looked interesting:
Freevo: http://freevo.sourceforge.net/
MythTV: http://www.mythtv.org/
furious_tv: http://furioustv.sourceforge.net/
PVRBOT: http://pvrbot.sourceforge.net/
Showtime PVR: http://showtime.flawless.dk/

Also, what type of hardware (video capture card, sound card, etc..) do
people recommend? Obviously, the cheaper the better. The Hauppauge products
(http://www.hauppage.com/)  seem to be popular. Have people had good success
with those?

TIA!

-sr
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