Hello everybody.

I have been thinking for a while to buy a new PC to usa as a Linux based PVR.

Since my Laptop dropped yesteray, and it's monitor is now defective but still usable, while the rest is still working, it seems a good candidate for the thing.

I would use it mainly for:

- TV viewing
- CD, DVD, MPEG and DivX playback.
- TV hard disk recording
- FM listening
- digital capture from old tapes

So, all I need now, if I'm correct is:

- a TV tuner card (I'm not interested in sat TV, but I am in digital TV).
- a FM tuner card
- a good video capture card (I'd really like to make good captures of my old tapes, so I think I'd go for RAW capture instead of an integrated MPEG capture card, so I can edit the video footage later at hi quality).

Problem is that all these cards must be EXTERNAL.

My Laptop is an HP Pavilion dv1000. Has 3 USB connector, a firewire connector, a PCMCIA slot, has a Celeron M 1500 processor and 512 MB RAM.

The hardware seems well supported by Linux, I use an Ubuntu distro and the only things that don't work off the shelf are the SD card reader and wi-fi, which I don't care much. I think I will use a KnoppMyth is I devote my poor laptop to be just a PVR, for ease of installation.

Can anyone suggest me some external devices that work well for Linux and are not too expensive? If using external peripherals is too costly over internal ones, of course I'd prefer to ditch the laptop and buy a new PC altogether.

P.S. I'm not sure if the processor is powerful enough for the editing and capture tasks I want to do. I'm a complete newbye on the matter. Let's just say that time is not an issue. If the hardware is enough to do a good high quality capture from, say, a VCD tape in realtime, without loosing frames or loosing quality, if the following compression tasks take hours, I don't care. I can leave the PC going on all night if needed.

Alternatively, I can just RECORD from TV and VCR with the laptop, and then move to another desktop PC to do the editing (I have another PC, it's just that is too big to put it near my TV and noisy to use as a 24/7 hours on PVR).

Thank you very much.

A mobile Celeron is not fast enough for raw video capturing. A mobile Celeron is designed for simple tasks. You need at least a 2 GHz Pentium 4 (Northwood core) with a very, very fast large capacity hard drive. The hard drive needs to have a sustain throughput of 60 megabytes per second. I recommend four IDE or SATA hard drives setup in RAID level 0 to compensate on the worst conditions. The type of filesystem that is used and what options you select for the chosen filesystem effects the sustain throughput. I recommend XFS with custom format options. A video card helps a lot to display the video but it does not have to be a +$1000 version. A nVidia GeForce6 6200 is sufficient. The minimum RAM is 512 megabytes. The sound card can be anything, but I recommend Audiotrak Prodigy 7.1LT for the best playback and recordings. I recommend any PCI video capture card based on Philips SAA713x chip.

To make a PVR or DVR system, select any mini-itx boards and two Hauppauge PVR-250. You will need a powered PCI riser card to place two PVR cards in a mini-itx system. Keep the PVR cards cool because they do malfunction when adding a little heat to them. I suggest using two hard drives. One for the OS and the other for the recordings. Any PVR or DVR program can be used. Most people pick MythTV.