Summary: I have a micro-ATX case, and needed to save space. Well to keep my PCI slots open more, I bought one of these. It's definitely worth it in my opinion. I'm hoping MCE XP could soon use 3 tuner cards to record more than 2 shows at once. Prime time is a killer! So, stop being a slave to the commercials and get back control of your time. 20 minutes an hour of commercials?? Forget that! No wonder Harry Potter was on TV for 4 hours: 8 min commercial breaks! Bu-bye commercials, hello PVR!

Summary: From looking at the pictures, I thought the 2 coax - looking inputs were for each tuner. They're not - the top one connects to an antenna they provide for the radio, and the bottom connects to a cable source. I'm using this card with Fedora Core 3 and MythTV 0.18.1. Installation was almost flawless. The only catch is that the ivtv driver includes modules that are also provided by the main kernel. I also have a bttv card, and it stopped working when I used the ivtv version of the modules. When I switched to the kernel modules, both cards started working perfectly. Some people are using different versions of the card's firmware - the one on the installation cd works fine for me. Video quality on the coax inputs is excellent. I haven't tried the composite, svideo, or radio yet.

Summary: I did lots of reading on how to build your own DVR with spare parts, so I decided to take the plunge. Taking a P4 Northwood, an Intel 875P retail desktop board, with some extra 512MB of DDR400 ram, 1 30GB HD and 1 60GB, a CDRW, and a Soundblaster Live! soundcard I had spare, I threw all the components in a P4 compatible case. I did plenty of research on the best Linux distributions for MythTV (www.mythtv.org, which seems to be the most robust software solution out there for Linux based DVRs) and settled on KnoppMyth. Once I burned the ISO to CD, I popped it in the CDRW and away the install went. To make a long story short, without too much trouble the system not only recognized the PVR 500 out of the box, but I was up and running watching live tv in less than 5-6 hours. This sounds like a long time, but for those who know Linux (or just enough to be dangerous like me!) realize it takes a while to compile missing drivers, configure things you way you like them, etc. I am sure this card works as advertised in Windows Media Center Edition, I just didn't want to shell out the extra $$$ for the OS!

I have read the video quality (output) of this card might not be as good as the 250 or 350 model, but it does the job for me as I am quite happy with the video quality - it's not DVD MPG4 but an encoded then decoded MPG2 stream after all. Definitely don't hesitate to purchase this board - you won't be disappointed! If *I* can get it to work, then you can, too!