So much for a long-weekend (to replace Queen’s Birthday, when I was on-call) without going near a computer. On Saturday, I picked up a Dvico Fusion Dual Digital 4 HDTV card, destined for the PVR that I’ve been intending to build for a while now.
I’ve been holding off buying one of these cards until there was Linux support for them, and that finally appeared in the last couple of months (including modifications to the firmware to make it work properly in Australia). There’s a good tutorial on getting it going here, and I had the card working in my computer within an hour or so.
I was quite surprised that I was able to pick up both the ABC and SBS with just a shoddy rabbit-ears antenna; even the ABC HDTV broadcast worked reasonably. Normally any sort of radio reception in my house, without an external antenna, is pretty horrible, due to the number of RF-noise-generating devices I have (and analog TV is just terrible, even with the antenna).
The next step is to find an extremely quiet case and power-supply to build the PVR with. If anyone has any recommendations of these that can be purchased in Australia (preferably inner Melbourne, but mail-order is ok too), I’d welcome any comments. Wouldn’t mind trying to make the system as low-power as possible, too…
Once I’ve got that built, I’ll start looking for DVB-S cards that work under Linux, to hook up to my satellite dish.
I’ll be interested to know what you end up choosing.
I’m thinking about a similar setup, and have been looking at a VIA EPIA-EN12000EG and a SUPER5 CPC-901B Mini-ATX case. This case can hold two hard drives, which is important for me because this will be a NAS first and maybe a MythTV box down the track.