[mimesis]

I know I might get flamed for not searching enough. However, I'm on a tight time frame at the moment and don't have much time to myself to research this on my own for a few more weeks and I'd rather order the parts (if I do need different hardware) before that.

Basically I just built a new low power HTPC based off the AMD Zacate processor. I am using a nightly build from a Wednesday night and would love to keep it so here are my questions, keep in mind the OS is Windows 7.

1.) Is there anyway I can keep this build of XBMC and install an XBMC PVR build on the same machine without conflicting issues?

2.) My plan was to use the old HTPC as my backend. Is this possible? From my quick research it seems a lot of the topics hint at the fact that the backend is running on the same machine as XBMC.

3.) If I can in fact run the backend on a different machine then does that machine need to be running the same OS? Meaning since my new build is a Windows machine, does the backend PC need to be running a version of windows as well or can it run linux instead?

4.) This one is a shot in the dark if it can't be answered I guess I'll try to find time to actually find a definitive answer. I have 2 USB tuner cards, a Hauppage HVR850 and a Diamond TVW 750. The 850 will be used for OTA and the 750 will be grabbing clear QAM. If I can as I stated in point #3 I would love to use a linux build for the backend but I'm not sure if these cards will work with MythTV as the backend in linux. If you have any information on this I am all ears.

If you guys need info on the backend PC I will be throwing together here's the plans from parts lying around, if you don't think it's up to par I can order some new hardware.

CPU - AMD X2 6400+
RAM - 4gb Corsair Dominator DDR2
MoBo - Asus M2Ne SLI
HDD - 500gb WD Caviar Green

I'm not sure if these USB cards can offload to the GPU for transcoding the stream. If they do I can also throw in my old 8800GTS G92 or my old 430GT, again that's all dependant on whether or not it'll even need it.

[MartijnGP]

1) I know it is (was?) possible on Windows where you could select a portable installation that stored all the data in it's program files folder. However, I must say that I've been missing this option when I last installed an Eden build.

2) It's possible. But you do need a beefy network connection. On my 802.11n network switching channels takes a good 15 seconds which is highly annoying. Ofcourse, WiFi isn't really suited for this, but as PVR isn't fully optimized yet there is already a noticable ammount of lag. You'd want to eliminate as much of it as possible and streaming over a network isn't going to help.

3) Ofcourse it doesn't. It's why protocols are made

And I don't know about 4 But generally you can get enough information Googling your tuner type + the backend you want to use. Your hardware should do fine. I've got a AMD 64X2 5600, 2GB of RAM and a Radeon 2900XT and it needs to work it's ass off, but it's still smooth.

[tsp42]

4) Googling around it looks like your Hauppage HVR850 is supported but the diamond is not supported by linux. So you will have to use windows or another usb tuner for QAM. Also MythTV usually just save the DVB stream without doing any transcoding so the hardware requirements for the backend is low.

Ref:
Hauppage HVR850: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1057089
Diamond TVW 750: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.ph...53717.html

[Kirky99]

You can run the backend on the same PC, however I've found it more convenient to run it on a separate machine. I'm running multiple XBMC clients however.

MediaPortal seems to be the current winner in the backend front in terms of functionality and support, that means a Windows backend. This is just my opinion however. TVHeadend seems to be right up there but wouldn't work for me.