As I begin to investigate the components of my Mythical TV I suspect that I will go for an nVidia graphics card, a pcHDTV card for OTA HDTV, a Seasonic or Enermax Power Supply, a couple of Samsung 160GB Hard drives, and either a Hauppauge PVR350 or a Twinhan TH1022 . And that’s just for starters.

I need to see how I will feed the 4DTV into the MythTV box. Since 4DTV is Motorola proprietary, and they don’t have a PC card, I will probably need to add a video capture card and feed the component video into the box. Still to be investigated. And I need to see if there is an MPEG2 4:2:2 receiver card I can can get, instead of the PVR350 or the Twinhan (I think they are both 4:2:0 receivers.) I think the 4:2:2 decoders run into $K. But I will keep on looking.

So, it looks like I will need at least 6 5v PCI slots to support the cards I am looking at. And I still haven’t looked at the sound card yet. I was planning on feeding the audio into my home stereo, but I still need to support 5.1 audio.

And at least a 2.4 GHz CPU, preferably 3+ GHz. And that’s going to generate a lot of heat, so I need to see how it will be cooled. A lot of factors to consider.