noob building a linuxMCE system

[DTskull]

Hi everyone!!

I'm very exited about LinuxMCE and I want to build a cheap system for my dorm (poor student). So I need some advice.

----------What I have--------------------------------

>T.V. Old CRT 27-inch.
            -RCA input.
            -Coaxial Cable input.
>PC (kind of old)
            -CPU 1800 MHz AMD.
            -512 RAM (plan to update to 1 GB).
            -Nvidia Geforce 5500 256 MB with S-video output.
            -Hard Drive 120 GB.
            -Sound card integrated.

---------Planning to buy------------------------------------
-TV tuner card to plug in my standard time warner cable service.
-1 GB of RAM
-Audio cable to plug in PC sound card to TV RCA input.

Do you guys think this will work?
Whats the best way to connect my PC to the TV?
which TV tuner card should I get?
Am I missing something?

Thank you so much for your time! 

[dopey]

Should be just fine for regular SD and DVD recordings. I wouldn't try to play any HD recordings off of that though. Also your video card is kind of old. You may have to downgrade (yes, I said downgrade) your nvidia drivers in order to get that working. I'm not sure if LinuxMCE does that for you or not... I've never tried. With the proper version of the drivers it should run UI2, but don't try to run it with overlay.

Using an S-Video to RCA adapter is probably your best bet.

Since your doing regular SD recordings only (you only have an SD TV anyhow) a cheap WinTV PVR-150 would do the trick. You should know that you won't be able to record analog over the air for long and will need a separate box to convert the digital signal to analog in the future.

The only thing you were missing was the cable to connect to your tv... and well the home automation stuff...

[DTskull]

Thanx a lot for the info dopey!!

I'll get right away on it and post my results.

whats the Video Card requirement to run the UI2 with overlay?

[dopey]

I don't know the exact requirements, but I've successfully ran UI2 on some rather old cards, including a Geforce 4. So I'm sure you'll be fine, it just may take a little bit of elbow grease. UI2 just uses OpenGL and requires hardware acceleration. However, the transparency requires a more powerful card.