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Misc.
Hardware
System Requirements
A 400 MHz class CPU is sufficient for a low-end system to play music, movies and watch TV.
Graphics Board
Almost any graphics board can be used. Freevo uses SDL which supports X11, FB, etc.
Video Capture and Compression
Any Video4Linux1/2 compatible board, which includes the popular Hauppage WinTV boards. There is also support for recording via the Hauppauage PVR cards, provided they are based on the ivtv-chipset.
VCD-quality video compression can be in software via mp1e even on a Celeron 400, but higher quality compression like MPEG-2 or Divx/Xvid require a more powerful machine.
Soundcard
Any OSS or ALSA compatible board. It helps if it can support the sample-rates that will be used for movies and music. DVDs for instance use 48 KHz which some older soundcards do not support.
If your card supports it and has a SPDIF or optical output, you can use AC3 audio.
Remote Control (Optional)
A remote is not necessary if the keyboard can be used instead.
It is pretty easy to build an RS232 infra-red receiver board for your remote control. It works with lirc, where you can also find the schematics.
It works with most remotes.
Some WinTV boards have builtin IR receivers for the bundled remote. It should also work with lirc.
If you don't want to build a receiver yourself, you can buy one for $35
Configurations
An industrious person has setup a hardware database where people can show configurations of hardware that they have used with PVR software running on Linux.
To see the database configurations for Freevo users, click here