It came nicely packaged and although the outer packaging was somewhat beat up, the inside packaging and product itself, were pristine. The keyboard came with a two prong IR adapter. One prong is for the keyboard and the other for the mouse, so it appears there is a dual input/output operation of some kind going on. It gave me a momentary scare as I thought about the proprietary nature of it, however, the remote I got is a learning remote and should be able to easily emulate the whatever signals are being passed. If its a problem, I'll let you know.
Next came the pchdtv card. This one came packaged with an adapter for the S-video and audio as well as a driver disk and installation instructions:
I love the fact that it has Tux on it! A buddy of mine found that there are reports of this card successfully being used under MythTV to pull QAM signals so Im hopeful that I will be able to pull it off. I fancy myself a bit of a Linux geek, I guess we will see.
In discussions with my buddy, we nailed down my setup. He has been playing with his MCE setup for some time and is apparently in a position to help me along. Thanks Ray! Anyhow, looks like I'll end up with basically 5 available tuners. Three on the HTPC box and two more on the STB. I'll run both the HTPC and the STB into the HDTV. If at all possible, I will also be pulling the firewire signal over to the HTPC. That all depends on the STB I end up with and whether or not I can find, hack, or beg a way to get that data off of it. That would be the best of all worlds, I would end up with essentially 5 tuners, 3 digital, 2 analog and actually one FM Tuner too boot!
I wanted to take a few minutes and talk about the core of the system and how and why I chose the hardware that I did. I'll start with the very core of the system, the CPU. I had originally planned on using an AMD chip, but after reading a number of reviews, I changed to the Intel chip mostly for the heat factor. I would have preferred to use AMD myself, but at this point, for this build, the Intel chip was a better choice. Lower clock speed, less heat, with equal performance, it seemed a no-brainer, but I guess we will see how hot my box gets!
Once I made the decision on the chip, the next was the motherboard and thus began a real quest. Let me explain. I had a number of requirements for the motherboard. If I was going Intel, I wanted a motherboard that would support the new quad-core chips as well as support > 4Gb memory. I also insisted on built-in firewire as I did not want to waste a PCI slot for it. I wanted a PCIe 16x bus for the video card and four additional PCI slots. Funny that this would not seem to be a show stopper, but you try to find a current 775 Intel board with PCIe and 4 PCI slots....I could not. This left me in a quandry as I originally thought I needed two Hauppauge 250 cards(I really only needed one 500 with dual tuners), the pchdtv card and a decent sound card. However, after poking around a bit, I found that for the most part, the onboard 7.1 Surround Sound is really good enough. Im not an audiophile at all, so we're going to give it a shot. So this left me only needing two PCI slots, and really wanting 3 so I have some room for expansion if wanted or needed. Once the PCI slots were narrowed to three instead of four, a number of other boards became available. At that point I started looking at manufacturers, pricing, and reviews. After it was all said and done, the Asus P5B Deluxe had risen to the top as the cream of the crop. Having have only good experiences with Asus, this worked well for me.
The only other thing at the core of the system is the memory. I have not use OCZ memory, but those in the know tell me that it is top notch memory and you cannot go wrong with it. That was good enough for me. I havent worked much with the newer motherboards and memory configurations, so I had to go with the advice of others on this choice.
Well the sums it up for today. I expect the core of the deliveries to come in tomorrow, however, according to UPS, it looks like the case will not be in until thursday, so likely no build will begin until friday night or so. Anyhow, tomorrow I'll talk a bit more about some of the hardware choices and touch on why I chose MythTV.....
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