Looking for Advice on my Required setup?

[takagari]

I am moving to my new house, and plan to setup a media network within the house to record play archive shows and to easily get to them from all my tv's..

Here's what I want
1 machine that I would like as a server/encoder pc to stream and record all my media. Probably itself the large server, some seriouse space, or posibly an external server.

Then I am wanting one of the HD extenders for my living room and a regular extender for my bedroom.

What is my best choice for software on the main pc? and is using it as my encoder/recorder as well as main storage server.
and if so, and if I use one or two cap cards can i stream cable signals over the network or must they be recorded then streamed?

I'm having a hard time figuring out how well the extender's manipulate the main pc. do they duplicate it perfectly? all the same features?
Also will the regular extender support h.264 files?

[CollinR]

You have all the right concepts down already.

Decently large server and lots of storage space, more then a TB is not uncommon here.

I would go Windows on the server just because there is more support for it, if you are a Linux guru have at it. I prefer Windows XP Pro myself.

You can use as many capture cards as you can fint in the server, SD or HD.

The extender's have basically the same GUI as the client. Subtle differences in areas like SW decoder, the extender has a hardware decoder not need to have these settings.

MVP supports h.264 if your server has enough CPU to transcode it to MPEG2 on the fly. My P4 D 3.2 does for at least a single MVP but I don't watch much h.264 right now.

[takagari]

awesome

So It will stream as long as I build a strong enough pc to transcode

[toricred]

I would strongly recommend looking at the HD extenders when they come back in stock (hopefully soon). They don't put extra load on the server and can handle almost any kind of video you throw at it.