Like many others, I am waiting to hear the final hardware specs so I can begin to figure out how this is going to work. I am hoping that the on-board graphics chip or the FPGA will be able to provide TV-output. If not, then I will have to go with one of the boards with the PCI slot and use an external card with TV-output.

One possibility if going this direction is to use a Hauppauge PVR-350. This has the advantage of providing both TV-input and TV-output. However, as the Efika system is meant to focus on being a MythTV frontend, the TV-input isn't absolutely necessary.

The other thing I am working on right now is trying to decide whether to go with an existing Linux distro or build a custom one for this. The advantage of going with a custom distro is that it would be able to be much smaller, which would add the possibility of running the system off of a small flash memory card (Compact Flash?).