Looks like Freeview's technial standards/protocols are called "DVB-T" for "Digital Video Broadcasting - Terrestrial" and there's a list of PCI cards that can handle it in the LinuxTV Wiki. Presumably all of which have working Linux drivers I guess.

Quite a few. And no damned prices on that list. Grr. Guess I'll have to google a price for each interesting looking one.....
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Yes! The Conspiracy Really Exists...

I have a Windows Media edition box that I'm planning to convert to Knoppmyth when I have a moment or two.

Recording programs on a Sempron 3000, I haven't seen cpu load exceed 35%. That's doing software MPEG encoding. I some performance stats are on the MythTV FAQ here. A modern CPU shouldn't have any problems, but a decoder card with built in MPEG encoding puts it beyond any reasonable doubt. Hauppauge seem the best supported and established TV cards.

My system (Sempron 3000, nvidia 7300 GPU, 1gb ram, 320GB drive, aluminium thermaltake case, MCE remotes and keyboard) cost a little over £500 including Windows MCE, so deduct £70 or so for no Windows. The case was about £100, so again you can make savings here if you don't want your system to look like a hi-fi component.

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Girls come and go but a mortgage is for 25 years -- JtL

was a few years ago -- but at the two problems I saw was that a) you couldn't use a junker PC if you wanted to complicated things like record and playback at the same time, and b) it was about as ready for primetime as linux was, so you'd better like screwing around trying to figure out why you couldn't watch shows instead of just watching shows.
signatures are for assholes.

Amongst other things provides IPTV using Linux servers.  He's also running a MythTV system at home, and I recently asked him about TV cards.  He said that you can't go wrong with the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 500.

There's also a WinTV Nova-T-500 which has two tuners in, but he's not tried it yet so can't be 100% certain it's as solid.  I've got a box of the feckers sat right next to me; maybe I should ask if I can nick one for "testing".

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"Engarde!" cried the larvae, huskily. - Scrymarch

I used an ancient hauppauge analogue capture card in a Via EPIA M10000 that we had lying around (it's a 1 ghz low power C3 processor, with some hardware for fast video playback). I wasn't expecting it to work frankly, since the compression step needed with the analogue board is so cpu intensive. It was a near thing, but the M10000 was very nearly fast enough for watching or recording (obviously, not both at once). If you're using digital capture boards, then it'd probably work fine in such a slow box since there's no compression step (I think Myth just demultiplexes and dump the mpeg2 stream straight to disk). I'd guess that one of Via's newer, faster, fanless boards would be a good choice.

I also messed about with MythTV streaming from a server to a low power client and that was fine. Massive pain in the arse to set up though.

I used the MythTV package in Ubuntu Edgy universe, and basic functionality worked pretty much straight away with not too much fiddling on a clean install. Getting TV listings was a mare, but again that should be vastly easier with digital cards.

You can get a Topfield Freeview PVR which you can then hook up to your PC and upload programs which supplement the offical software. This allows you to set up rather good EPG / timer control stuff that is almost the equivalent of Tivo's season pass. You can also download TV recordings to your PC and burn them to DVD, should you so wish.

It's easier than setting up your own MythTV box and (arguably) cheaper. The main downside is that you "only" have 160Gb storage (enough for about 80 hours) and you don't have as much control (eg. you can't hook it up to the internet and set programs to record via a web interface, like you can with MythTV).

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U.S. Patent 5443036 concerns a device for encouraging a cat to exercise by chasing a light spot.

PC upstairs with a Hauppauge Nova-T card in it, controlled from Digiguide with the PVRRecord plugin. TVersity UPnP media server also running and uTorrent (purely for Linux ISOs of course). It's a few years old, 1.3GHz AMD cpu, 0.75GB RAM, several discs to the tune of 250GB or so.

Downstairs a D-Link DSM-320RD Media player plus a Freeview box and the old DVD player returned as D-Link messed up an upgrade and downgrading again resulted in the DSM deciding it was Region 1 only. I'm not impressed by their support.

It's taken some fiddling, setting up PVRRecord at first is tedious as it needs a file mapping the Digiguide channels to the cards channels. I'm not sure how it would cope with more than one card, it would be nice if it did as it doesn't handle consecutive recordings with just one. Hopefully I can update to a newer model with go-faster stripes later in the year.