Getting Started

[ctgoodman]

Hi All, I'm new here.  I live on the East Coast of the United States and have Dish Network for my satellite provider with an older Echostar 3700 receiver.    I recently had done some research into TIVO, Replay TV, and Dish networks PVR.  The monthly fee involved I think is a total rip off as well as the limited functionality of any of these machines.  So I began some research into building my own PVR and came upon this site.  GBPVR seems like a great app.  I can't sink a ton of money into it right now but I have a PC I can dedicate already.  I just want to avoid getting started and realizing I need to buy two or three more things than expected.

What my needs are now is to buld a PVR that will play DVD's, record programming, and control my dish network receiver.  

PC Spec
PIII 700
512mb RAM
40GB HDD
DVD ROM
Windows XP SP2
10/100 ethernet
onboard video (no s-video out)

Is this a box that I should even think about getting started with.  If it is am I correct that I need a PVR card and another video card with S-Video out?

I am looking at a Hauppauge PVR-150 with the remote and IR blaster.  I read that the .90 version of GBPVR supports the blaster in this package, has anyone tried it with the hardware I have?  The other thing is the video card..  Will anything that has S-video out work?  I'm not building any sort of gaming rig so I'd hit ebay or whatever to find a cheap card that just works.

Thank everyon for reading my post.  I'm just fishing for some advice and experience others have had.

Thanks
Thomas G.

[Darx-starz]

Hi. Thats about what I had when I started. I piloted this product with others on a machine about the same spec as yours. I had in mind though that if I liked the product I would build a proper rig for it. You will need some way of displaying the captures. So you either get an old Nvidia card with TV out and use that to display or get a dedicated card. I bought a PVR350 that has video out. They are not that expensive and becuase the PVR350 has a hardware decoder its kind on the CPU. Beware though that the performance is not going to be great with such a low CPU. As Sub has said a few times you need more than 1GB processor for this application. Give it a shot though and see if its for you.