Advice Request: Is This Acceptable Hardware?

[hollow5555]

For the last year and a half I've been running a purpose built standalone PVR (2.8ghz, 1 gig of ram, GB-PVR, PVR150, 200gb drive that I upgraded to 500gb today). It's a wonderful thing! I even added an MVP box to my other tv so the rest of the family can enjoy my pvr. The problem is the MVP box is (as is the standard complaint) too dark.

So with me being a nerd and working for a thin client company, I got my hands on a neat little "diskless workstation" that has a PCI slot and an IDE slot as well. It WAS a thin client, but I'm thinking it would make a killer mini-pvr for the other tv. It's a 1 gigahertz machine with 512mb of ram. I could easily add a 2.5 inch hard drive with an ide->44pin converter (There's room in the small case). The onboard video card is a "via cle266" which apparently supports TV-out, meaning I could buy a cheap vga->svideo converter cable and it should work. My only concern is whether or not a PVR150 would fit in the case. Does anyone know the dimensions of the PVR150 card? I've got about 6.5 inches from the back of the case (where the pci card screws down) to the front. If the PVR150 won't fit is there a card that will that is GBPVR supported?

Would this hardware be sufficient for a simple, light use (4 to 5 recordings and 4 to 5 viewings per week) PVR? Should I go with the "add a large hard drive and use it as a standalone PVR" method or would a smaller drive be ok and then use the "client" mode of GBPVR (to slave it to my more powerful pvr)

Any thoughts and advice is welcomed! This nerd needs a project!

[mikiem]

If you search for "PVR150" at Newegg.com seems they have 4 normal sized cards & one mini: " Hauppauge WINTV-PVR 150MCE-LP TV Tuner Card PCI Interface - Retail"

The smaller card is longer but it looks to me like about 1/2 height including bracket. The other cards would be full height as far as the bracket goes, and just a bit longer than the pci slot you'd plug them into. DOn't know if that helps or not?

[hollow5555]

If you search for "PVR150" at Newegg.com seems they have 4 normal sized cards & one mini: " Hauppauge WINTV-PVR 150MCE-LP TV Tuner Card PCI Interface - Retail"

The smaller card is longer but it looks to me like about 1/2 height including bracket. The other cards would be full height as far as the bracket goes, and just a bit longer than the pci slot you'd plug them into. DOn't know if that helps or not?

I'll check it out, but thanks for reminding me of a very important fact I forgot to mention in the original post. The PCI slot sits in a riser so it's parallel to the mainboard and is therefore a full height slot.

Thanks

[Koenie]

The processor - video combo is very lightweight. I have ran GBPVR on a Duron 1300 and Geforce 6200 combo and this is about the minimum for PAL quality SD video. I would advise you to test playback first and decide afterwards. It all depends on how well the hardware acceleration of the video chip works.

[pBS]

that's a typical Via Mini mb...lots of posts about them..
yes, very underpowered, but may be able to do overlay...
i doubt any HD tho...
the pvr150 should fit nicely...many have used them with those boards..
[shorter than mb]
should do ok as a mvp replacement if you get the video working well..
[about same capabilities]