Thinking of switching from Topfield 5800 to HTPC running NextPVR

[Graham]

Are you MPEG or h.264 for UK HD?

H.264

PCI slots are described in more detail than anyone needs at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express ... scroll down to see a pic of the slots as they are on a motherboard. As Mr h49 says, PCI x1 cards (tuners and whatnot) will fit in the short and long slots. PCI x16 cards (graphics) will only fit in the long slots.

Blackgold cards are not tall and will fit in almost any old case. The cards come with a choice of two brackets ( full height and half-height ? ) that you have to attach to the card yourself.

[Graham]

Good Lord! Thought was some kind of industrial blower when I first saw the picture. ;-)

The fan is controlled by the MB and will only spin when the MB detects a high temp on the processor which will be never cos of the tower of fins (hence low noise). Probably, needs a full height case ... there may be other fans that are also quiet and smaller.

[HydeTheDarkerSide]

MPEG-4 I believe for FreeToAir "Freeview HD" in the UK

Thanks for the PCIe lesson. Doubt I'll use a dedicated graphics card, probably settle for the MB on-board graphics. Likewise for the 5.1/7.1 sound. So the only card[s] I can think of will be the BlackGold one[s].

Reducing my HTPC specification has resulted in a box around £800, but I'd need to add the BlackGold card to that and they're approx. £160.00

[Graham]

For Freeview only (no satellite) there is the BGT3620 @ about £90 for a dual tuner ... shop around ... it may be cheaper from Scan or somewhere.

NextPVR is able to record multiple simultaneous channels from a single mux using a single tuner ... for example BBC1 and BBC2 and BBC3 and BBC4 all recording simultaneously using one tuner. There are currently 5 SD (DVB-T) muxes and one HD mux (DVB-T2) with one (or more) SD muxes and two (or more) HD muxes coming soon.

http://www.ukfree.tv/txdetail.php?a=TQ339712

[Graham]

... around £800 ...

Seems a lot. I would expect that you could get by with one of

http://www.scan.co.uk/shop/computer-hard...1/753/1012

and one of

http://www.scan.co.uk/shop/computer-hard...ocket-1155

You could go to an i5 to be bullet-proof. Get an HDMI motherboard and the TV as monitor.

[HydeTheDarkerSide]

Cheers, but not sure those links are working for me. I just get a page of products, Motherboards in the first instance and cpu's in the second.

I do want i5 for that very reason, might have to do video editing on it, so need 8GB of memory too as I could well be multi-tasking. And absolutely, the TV will be the monitor as the box needs to replace my WHS, so the case needs to support a number of HDD's and I need the TV to view anything recorded with NPVR and of course playback my picture, video and music libraries. Then I need a blu-ray DVD player (DVD/CD writer) in order to continue ripping my DVD collection and future music CD's. Would be useful to have wi-fi and Bluetooth as I'd like to get some BT speakers for the conservatory as it's getting difficult to source additional Squeezebox devices that I use currently for music distribution. I'd also want a BT keyboard/mouse to be able to control the box from the sofa.

[HydeTheDarkerSide]

Might be able to borrow (on a semi permanent basis) an Acer Aspire X3200 AMD Athlon dual core 7450 PC with 3MB memory and running Windows Vista. I'm pretty sure the owner would allow me to put W7 on it. But this is a small form factor PC. Could anyone confirm the ability to put a BlackGold http://shop.blackgold.tv/epages/BT3159.s...ts/BGT3602 card in it? I'm fairly confident it will, but just wanted to check if anyone else here had such a PC and had fitted low profile PCI-e card[s] in it?

Whilst the PC probably wouldn't do long term (I believe the fan makes a fair bit of noise and this would prevent it being the lounge for too long) I could at least just shell out on the tuner card to prove the concept before diving in deeper with a silent i5 HTPC.

Is this a goer please?

Cheers

[Graham]

The low profile bracket that came with my Blackgold card is 80mm end to end. Apologies if I am stating the bleedin' obvious ... the BGT3602 is dual DVB-T/T2 plus dual DVB-S/S2 giving two Freeview tuners plus two Freesat tuners.

[HydeTheDarkerSide]

Cheers, yeah I know what the dimensions of the BG card are it's the internal dimensions of the Acer PC I don't know. As it's a small form factor PC I don't know what the clearance is for add-on cards of this type are.

[HydeTheDarkerSide]

For Freeview only (no satellite) there is the BGT3620 @ about £90 for a dual tuner ... shop around ... it may be cheaper from Scan or somewhere.

Cheers but I need the Freeview & Freesat quad model. It's only available from Amazon and the BG shop for much the same price. The 3620 model also got a lot of pasting on the web, mainly bad drivers. I'm hoping that the 3602 doesn't suffer in the same way.