Opinions & recommendations sought

[m1k3g]

Well, after several years of thinking about it, I finally decided to dump the old ReplayTV and build my own DVR from the ground up. I put together a PC with a fairly nice MB that has DVI out, 7 channel sound, etc with a dual-core 2.53ghz processor, 4g of ram, 80g SATA main drive & an additional 360g SATA . Serial out but no firewire unfortunately. Running XP Pro SP3.

I bought a FusionHD7 card and already had an older Avermedia PCI 350 that I'm hoping to use in a dual tuner setup. MCE remote w/Blaster & a BTC multimedia keyboard.

My questions are around the setup with my FIOS QIP2500 STB. With the ReplayTV, I'm using a coax connection from the STB. With the new setup, would I be better off using component out going into the FusionHD? I had originally thought about possibly splitting the coax output from the STB into both cards, but I'm not sure about the results of that type of setup. The Avermedia card only has coax in, so there's nothing I can do there.

So far, I'm running a sort of 'parallel' system, with the ReplayTV still in place and coax running from it to the TV input to ensure that the family can still watch their shows and the DVI out going to one of the HDMI inputs so that I can switch back & fourth for testing purposes.

My experience so far hasn't been too good. I have SageTV 6.4 running on the PC, and the FusionHD card getting a split coax feed from the STB. I have installed LM Remote to try to get the MCE blaster to change channels on the STB, since I can't figure out how to make the serial port change channels on the STB from SageTV, but I'm not getting any response. I also find that the 'live TV' picture is 4:3 instead of 16:9, but only when running SageTV.

I plan to try disconnecting the ReplayTV completely sometime soon and running the STB directly into the FusionHD to see if I can improve the picture size & quality (the Replay looks pretty fuzzy in 1080p).

Sorry for the long-winded post, but any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks