[jcontonio]

I am planning on buying the base mac mini with an added superdrive, and 512 of RAM to accompany an EyeTV 200. I plan on putting this setup in the corner of my roof on a shelf, headless...using Remote Desktop to set it up, control it, and the Titan -TV web interface to set the recordings up, etc...

Do you think that the standard 40 GB 4200 RPM drive along with a 250 GB Firewire (LaCie) drive will be enough/fast enough for writing the video files? If I want to burn shows to dvd and watch them on a dvd player, what mpeg do I need to turn them into, mpeg2? mpeg4? Or would I just use iMovie/iDVD to make them?

[Uncle Skeleton]

Don't you dare try capturing, editing or encoding video on the internal drive. It's basically a laptop drive, and video-related use will severely shorten its lifespan. An external drive should be fine (and hey if it does die at least you can replace it without much trouble).

The EyeTV should be giving you DVD compliant files right off the bat. I haven't used one, but my cable box does a similar thing and I'm pretty sure EyeTV has had a how-to page up for a while about how to send your captured video directly to Toast even after editing out commercials (within the EyeTV software; this is important since it is a native MPEG editor and most other things aren't, they will convert to another format and then back again). You don't want to be using any iApps for this; they are only suitable for their real purpose which is home movies from your DV cam. If you already have MPEG (you will), don't convert it to DV and back when you don't have to. Doing so will lose you lots (lots!) of time and image quality.

[jcontonio]

You are awesome my man...thanks