A guy I know from another forum PM'd me the following. Unfortunately I am not as much of a geek as he thinks I am, so I am not in much of a position to comment, other then I don't think that what he wants to do is feasible for money he is considering. But I figured the Forum would be able to put together a better answer.

What I am looking to do is build a HTPC for the center of my HT. I want to be able to record up to 4 programs at a time. I would like to hook the PC up to my HT and control it by remote all of which I know there are PCI boards for and also good software.
Good audio 5.1 at least from the sound card.
All this should be able to network with my laptop but while I am able to put this stuff together getting it to work is another matter I am an audio tech (sound engineer for bands , studio) so working with this stuff is not that hard but I never got into computers till it was to late to really know what I am doing.
I keep hoping some one will come out with a good HTPC but the few that have are way out there like 6000$ and that is crazy. I am looking at $1000-$1500 at the most.

MS hasn't made it easy to enable more than two tuners under MCE. There are some tricky directions out there that explain how to enable four, which I tried, but it became apparent why MS doesn't make it easy, as my machine ran out of oomph trying to deal with moving 4 streams to disk.

I'd recommend Mythdora. It will handle four tuners just fine. In fact, I don't see any reason why you couldn't hook up 2 HDHomeRun's and have four HD tuners. It'd only cost $350 for the tuners and the software is free. Leaves the rest of your budget for hardware.

Actually, I have the opposite impression, but this might be a recent change. Apparently they just updated MCE to address a lot of TV issues, and one of the things they did was to really seamlessly combine multiple tuners into one channel lineup. I'm almost positive that it's pretty easy to have more than two tuners now.

*edit*
Just check out this post on EngadgetHD. The picture alone is encouraging.

A decent PC should be able to cope with 4 streams. My AMD X2 4400+ can do it from 2 PCI and and a dual USB tuner.

The issue as stated by Glenn is getting the data to disk. Using MythTV I have storage groups which essentially group together disks ala JBOD or RAID0. However it then records a show per disk essentially which eliminates the problem.

Recording 2 streams and playing back one should be fairly easy with a standard 3.5 drive.

It's not the raw data rate. HD TV is only around the 2 megabyte/sec rate. It's related to seek times since it has to seek to multiple different spaces whilst accessing multiple files.

It can easily be done in the $1000-1500 range BUT will possibly require a bit of manual tinkering.

Many motherboards come with optical/coax SP/DIF output and some are even coming with HDMI these days. HDMI Audio support can be a bit tricky to sort out.

It's really as simple as a normal PC with some kind of TV output + tuners (digital or analogue). There are many variations of getting the TV signal out of the air/space/cable.

MythTV is powerful but tricky for new users and sometimes drivers for hardware can be a pain if the hardware is brand new.

MCE can also be a bit funky to set up but is generally a bit easier to use.

Oh yeah and a +1 for Mythdora. Be careful of using the latest and greatest hardware because of the driver issue though.

Keep in mind that he will have to buy an OEM solution if he wants to record any digital or HD cable channels, as cablecard ready HTPC solutions are not sold directly to the public, at least with Vista anyhow.

I don't know why recording multiple streams should be that much of a problem. Why wouldn't a system record streams 1-n to storage blocks in alternating sequence. Recording video in unfragmented streams would seem to be counterproductive.

Now you done it. Rats, I've been holding off on updating my MCE box to Vista.

I've just found that 3 streams is about the limit per drive. I'm not saying it's trying not to fragment but even if it's pre-allocating space, the drive still has to seek for each stream. In fact I've had better success (but also using XFS instead of ext3 so two things changed) using it's pre-allocate feature.

BTW: All my experience is using FTA DVB-T since the only solution for Pay TV recording is to use the broadcaster's own PVR unless you simply record via analogue connection (composite/SVideo)

Thanks all. I'll pass this along.

Forget Microsoft's - tell him to get MediaPortal. Open source media center for the PC. Its great! Multiple tuners (of different types too), native Blu-Ray playback. Check it out.

I use mediaportal too. I guess mythtv on linux is great, but the pc is for gaming too, so i still need windows. Setup is pretty easy now with their deploytool which installs everything, even the database (mysql or mssql)
Recording 3 (non-hd, mpeg2) streams works ok on a single drive. (1 digital, and 1 dual tuner analog card)

Did everyone see that Nero has release TiVo PC? I think they call it "LiquidTV" but it's an official port of the TiVo UI to Windows (written in .NET)

The application alone is $99 or it's available with some hardware bundle. It includes 1 free year of TV listings. After that you have to pay, though I don't know how much. Maybe the same as normal TiVos.

Too little and too late for me. The UI is still decent, but the features are well behind the times, including the out-dated pricing model.