I've already mentioned that I have a Duron 850Mhz machine with 320MB RAM,
20GB & 15GB hard drives, and a TV Tuner card (AverMedia AverTV Stereo). 
I successfully installed SuSE 9.0 Linux onto it using the free FTP
install.

Now I've been browsing Linux PVR solutions, and there seems to be one
universal "feature" in all of them: if you want to record in MPEG I/II,
your TV card must support hardware encoding.  Otherwise you're stuck with
solutions using the avifile library, and probably the Indeo codec if you
don't care for the hacked DivX ;-) codec.

Are there Linux MPEG encoders?  If so, are any of them lower in cost
than, say, the cheap VCRs at Wal-Mart (less than $50) these days?  An
850Mhz Duron converts 30 minutes of AVI video into MPEG I (VCD) video in
about three hours.

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