[mythtv-users] recommendation for new combined frontend+backend?

[Frank Hartmann]

Hi,

I have been reading the mailing list archives, fori and hardware review
sites for days now and would like to get some input in order to avoid
'the wrong way'.

I would like to upgrade my old mythtv box which is a combined
frontend+backend:

* Celeron 1.3GHz, with 512MB RAM (dell gx50)

* DVB-S tuner, connected to ASTRA 19.2 recording SD streams from the
  satellite SAA7134/SAA7135HL

* video connected to TV using analog VGA(onboard Intel i810e)
* audio connected to HIFI using analog lines

* playing only previously recorded streams unchanged, no transcoding,
  commercial removal etc, no live-tv watching

* for reasons not fully understood I have zero interlacing artefacts,
  probably the TV shows I watch are progressive material. Basically I
  think there is currently no postprocessing during playback and I have
  good video quality.

* the box sets a bios timer for recording shows and powers off
  afterwards(if no one watches a recording currently)

* running debian and mythtv binaries from debian-multimedia

What I would like to achieve by the upgrade is (most import stuff first):

1) silence (harddisk and fan of current box is a small bit too noisy)
2) 720p50 record and playback (Astra ARD/ZDF/Arte HD) - I think this is H264 encoded
3) connect video to TV using HDMI



Currently I envision something like:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/25w-performance-pc,2551.html 

based on the assumption that low power == low noise.  But I learnt that
the Intel Graphic is a no go. The recommendations I read go strongly in
nvidia direction as far as I can see.  

On the otherhand I would like to use the CPU anyhow for decoding and
would prefer not to rely on a working GPU driver for playback. My
hope/motivation is increased system stability.

So I am searching for 

* a silent chipset/mainboard CPU combo, which can decode 2) and
 do the recording housekeeping in parallel in the background
* and a silent graphic card which can send out HDMI video
* and a DVB-S2 card.

correct? 

Do you anything like the above running and would like to share
your hardware configuration and experiences with me?


many thanks
  Frank