"The problem with HDTV tuner cards is hardware encoding. I don't think anyone has come up with a HDTV tuner that supports hardware encoding on the card. This means you'd have to have a fairly beefy system to the encoding."
There is NO encoding involved with an HD capture card! Why? The HD stream is already MPEG2 encoded. So all the HD capture card does is capture the video, and the PC writes it to the hard drive. That's it. Recording HD takes maybe 4% of my CPU.
I have no doubt that you could build a Media PC for under $1000. I've done it.
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ $140
MSI K8N Neo Platinum $95
NVidia 6600GT video card $140
1GB RAM $90
2 160GB hard drives $60 ($30 each on Black Friday)
HDTV Wonder $100 (CompUSA right now)
BenQ 1640 DVD Writer $40
Windows XP Media Center Edition $115
Some case with a 400W power supply $80
That is $860. I used the Kram drivers so I didn't need an SD capture card. And, actually, I already had a power supply and case for it from a previous computer project. I've since added another 250GB hard drive for $90, and I plan on adding another 500GB soon, which should work out to around $120. So, over 1TB for $120 + $90 + $60 = $270 using 5 hard drives. ;)
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"The problem with HDTV tuner cards is hardware encoding. I don't think anyone has come up with a HDTV tuner that supports hardware encoding on the card. This means you'd have to have a fairly beefy system to the encoding."
There is NO encoding involved with an HD capture card! Why? The HD stream is already MPEG2 encoded. So all the HD capture card does is capture the video, and the PC writes it to the hard drive. That's it. Recording HD takes maybe 4% of my CPU.
I have no doubt that you could build a Media PC for under $1000. I've done it.
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ $140
MSI K8N Neo Platinum $95
NVidia 6600GT video card $140
1GB RAM $90
2 160GB hard drives $60 ($30 each on Black Friday)
HDTV Wonder $100 (CompUSA right now)
BenQ 1640 DVD Writer $40
Windows XP Media Center Edition $115
Some case with a 400W power supply $80
That is $860. I used the Kram drivers so I didn't need an SD capture card. And, actually, I already had a power supply and case for it from a previous computer project. I've since added another 250GB hard drive for $90, and I plan on adding another 500GB soon, which should work out to around $120. So, over 1TB for $120 + $90 + $60 = $270 using 5 hard drives. ;)