phone33 :
I am looking to build a new HTPC.
I have some experience with HTPCs so I'll see what I can do for you. You were very smart to outline your current AV setup and what you want the system to be able to do as that will greatly help us out in figuring out what would work well for you.
Setup
I am using a 1 year old Samsung DLP with a Denon Audio reciver and JPL 5.1 surround sound speakers. I use my PS3 for blue rays and DvDs and my 360 for other games. Right now I have standard digital cable (no HD) and use an antenna for HD broadcast. My Tv has open VGA HDMI and component video in.
All right.
What i Want
DvD's on hard drive - around 50 and definitely no more than 100. (my roommates keep leaving my DvDs out of the box so if i back them up I can make sure they can scratch them.)
A single dual-layer movie DVD is at most 9.4 GB, so you will need to have 500 GB free HDD space for 50 movies and 1 TB HDD space for 100 movies if you do not re-encode them to save space but sacrificing quality and taking a lot of CPU time to encode. So worst-case is that you have 100 full-length DVDs that are just copied to the hard drive as ISO files, which will take 940 GB and best case is that you have 50 DVDs that are encoded to about half of their original size, for roughly 250 GB being used just for DVD videos.
DVR - just digital cable and an antenna for broadcast HD but will eventually want to record HD cable also(if that is even possible) DVR and DvD will probably take up some space so i will need a big Hard drive but i don't think i will need anything like a terabyte, Right?
Okay, so you will need to get an HDTV (ATSC) tuner card with video inputs. That will give you an HD tuner for your antenna and coax/composite/S-video inputs to grab the SDTV picture outputted by your cable box through the composite, S-video, or coax output. There are several such cards on the market and they are not terrifically expensive. I have an SDTV setup that works somewhat like this where I have my digital cable box connected to my PC's capture card via the red-white-yellow composite cables and the computer changes the channel of the cable box via an RS-232 serial connection (although an IR blaster will work if your cable box does not have an RS-232 port.) It works very well and should work for you too.
As far as HDD space goes, full-bitrate 1080p HDTV takes up 19 GB/hour and standard-definition TV at usual recording bitrates of 5-6 Mbps takes up roughly 1 GB/hour. You can re-encode the MPEG-2 TV streams down to a smaller bitrate and use a more-space-efficient codec like you can for DVDs, but this also can take quite a bit of CPU horsepower, particularly for HDTV. I don't know how much recorded TV you intend to store on your computer, so your space requirements will vary a lot. I'd budget for 100-200 hours of recorded TV as that's about what I have and what most people I know with DVRs and HTPCs have. That means 100-200 GB for SDTV and 2-4 TB for raw 1080p full-bitrate HDTV.
Blue Ray - planning on using the PS3 still unless blue ray players have become dirt cheap and i did not notice.
You can get BD-ROM drives for a computer for about $200 last time I checked. They're not $800-1000 like they were last year but they're not $30 like DVD burners are either. [reading below] Oh, and since you intend to use MythTV, you're going to be running Linux and you cannot play back any commercial Blu-ray movies due to AACS/BD+ DRM not being broken yet.
Game Emulator - mostly N64 and SNES so this thing does not need to be a graphics power house.
That does not take much GPU or CPU power, correct.
OS - Was planing on using Myth Tv unless there is something better or Myth is really complicated to set up.
Ah, excellent choice. I run MythTV on Debian Linux and it runs very nicely. MythTV can be anywhere from very simple to quite complicated to set up, mostly dependent on what you want to do with it and what Linux/Unix distribution you decide to run it on. If you intend to record and play back your stuff *only* on the HTPC, it's a dead simple, fall-off-a-log setup using a dedicated MythTV distribution like Mythdora, Mythbuntu, or KnoppMyth as they are pretty much set up correctly "right out of the box." If you want a media server type of setup with one machine doing the recording and multiple client computers/HTPCs, this is a bit more complicated of a setup as you have to tweak a little with MythTV, MySQL and a few Linux network configuration files. However, I do it, it wasn't all that hard to get set up, and once it is set up it doesn't need to be touched again.
Budget - around 1K$ and i am in no rush to build this so if new hardware is on the horizon i can wait.
All right, let's get started here with a sample system:
1. CPU: Athlon X2 5200+ Brisbane (not encoding video)
Intel Core 2 Quad Q66000 (if you are intending to encode video)
2. Motherboard: any AMD 740G/780G micro-ATX motherboard (AMD CPU)
Intel G3x-series micro-ATX motherboard (Intel CPU)
-Make sure it has a serial port.-
3. RAM: 2x1 GB DDR2-800- will be more than enough but RAM is cheap.
4. HDD: 1 TB hard drive, you may want 2 or 3 if you intend to record a lot of OTA HDTV.
5. GPU: NVIDIA 7300GS/GT or ATi HD 3650. The NVIDIA G70 is the last generation that has XvMC that greatly reduces CPU load while playing back video. Otherwise, the HD 3650 is a nice card and is better-supported than NVIDIA G80/G90/GT200 cards on Linux.
6. Tuner card: Stick with Hauppauge! cards and anything based on Conexant or Philips chips as they are pretty well-supported on Linux. Do not get USB-based cards or ATi Theater-based units as these do not work on Linux. Make sure to get one
7. Case: A pretty one that will fit your hard drives.
8. PSU: A good-quality 300-watt unit such as a Seasonic will fit the bill.
9. Optical drive: SATA DVD burner
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