Hardware Setup

First of, you need a bit of hardware know-how. My hardware selection is pretty specific to my needs. They are most likely not the best choices, but for me they are well suited.

The rough base set up contains:

• CPU and RAM matching your needs; there's not a whole lot of RAM required, but do note that linux optimizes depending on the amount of RAM available: more RAM is never lost.
• A video card with DRI and GLX, preferrably with TV-out; an ATI Radeon/FireGL or nVidia Geforce/Quadro is preferred. Video RAM is less important, but you need to have enough to enable double/triple buffering, etc.
• An audio card, capable of hardware mixing and has to have multiple hardware channels. AC97-based cards often don't have any of this, so avoid them whenever possible. I know Creative SBLive, Audigy, and X-Fi cards has full hardware mixing, and multi-channel support, but I'm sure there are others.
• A TV-tuner card, supported by v4l. It is very recommended to look out on the internet to see which cards are properly supported, and which cards are not. Also check for caveats, quality/price comparisons, and the likes. The last thing you want is to buy an expensive card and find it has poor support in linux. If the card you're interested in, is not supported natively through the kernel, you might want to see whether the IVTV project doesn't have support. Anyway, also be sure to check the features the card has. For instance, if you want to be able to record from one channel while watching another (or record 2 channels at once), you need to get a card with two TV-tuners.
• Disk space, and disk throughput. Depending on whether you're planning on recording from TV, storing video, and such, you might want to consider spending a bit on finding out the required disk space. More important is the throughput: it has to be fast enough to allow for live TV recording. As an example: the average recording of PAL TV, lies around a little over 1MB/s. If your disks and system can't handle it, you have a problem.
• A DVD reader is required for playback of DVDs (duh). If you're planning on writing DVDs, of course, you also need a DVD writer. Because Blu Ray is coming up, try to get one that supports it (do writers exist already?).

My hardware

Below, is an overview of the hardware I used, and why I used it.

Basic hardware

The system I used has as name Tsuruya. It's a AMD Athlon64 X2 BE-2350 (clocked at 2100mhz). It's a 45W CPU: low power usage, but with fair performance. The system has 1GB RAM (divided in 2x 512MB DDR2-667). The main board is an Asus M2A-VM.
The case is an Antec Fusion (link: http://www.antec.com/ec/productDetails.php?ProdID=08740), which is particular designed for this kind of work: it has a neat design, is very silent, and is pratical.

Peripherals

Peripherals come mostly from onboard things: network, USB, and the likes are on the motherboard. Hardware is supported by the standard linux kernel, accept for network (RTL8168 is not yet supported, but a native linux driver is available at the Realtek site), and the iMon LCD display (no driver just yet).

Video card

My video card is a Asus EN6400LE (Geforce 6400 LE), with 64MB. It has three outgoing ports: a DVI port, a VGA port and a S-Video port (for connecting to a TV). At the moment I don't own a TV (partially due to lack of space on my desk), so I'm watching my things on my pc monitor (an HP 19-inch TFT), which for the moment is enough.
I don't use the onboard video (which is a ATI Radeon X1250), because of lack of support: it has poor performance in OpenGL (not that important), and currently seems to be missing a supported XVideo overlay (very important!).

Audio card

The system contains two audio cards: the primary one is an Audigy 1 Player on a PCI card. It provides full Dolby 5.1 support, and has a IEEE1394 firewire port. And more important, it has full hardware mixing and hardware multi-channel support.
The secondary card is the on board one, some Intel HDA based card, which is rarely used, unless I absolutely need to use it.

Other multimedia hardware

For my TV tuner, my computer dealer recommended me the Hauppauge PVR-500 card. It has dual TV tuners, dual MPEG2 hardware (de)coders, S-Video/Composite and audio inputs. It is supported in linux through the the IVTV project, and works very well with MythTV.

Storage

It has a single Maxtor HD, 250GB SATA300.

Misc hardware

Normally, I'd be using the built-in iMON LCD display, but because there's no support of this device in linux at the moment, I'm using my old CrystalFontz CF-634 device through USB:

It's used to display system information, but since MythTV has support for it through the LCDproc daemon, I'm using it for that now. More information on this later on, though.

My remote control is a Microsoft MCE remote. It's version RC-6, with a Philips USB IR receiver.

Technically, the MCE remote is compatible with the on-board iMON IR receiver, but that would require a whole of extra tweaking of LIRc, and because of the interlinking of the iMON LCD display, it spews out quite funny things in syslog. Overal, it's more easier to use the IR receiver for the remote is designed.