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Thanks to all for your excellent responses full of good information.

To give you an idea of my plans:

Currently I have a Pansat 2500 connected 90cm dish with a standard linear LNB. This system was originally purchased so my Dutch wife could watch BVN on IA5 mostly to catch the sports highlights (studio sport and sportjournaal) as she loves sports (mostly football - the kind actually played with the feet ). Being an Engineer and thus by default a tech weenie it is in my genes to always upgrade/improve my toys. And of course I want to receive everything I can (legally - if I wanted DBS I would subscribe to it). My big interest is in sports feeds so everything I do is geared toward that.

First I added a motor so I could see almost the entire arc - found Goltv by accident (remember I have a STANDARD linear LNB so wouldn't really be looking at circularly polarized sats).

Next I slaved an old analog receiver I got off ebay (TRX-120) after reading about all the feeds Iceberg was always getting off SBS-6 and AMC-9.

As I was just in The Netherlands last week I picked up the universal LNB I had a relative purchase for me 2 months prior (Invacom single) so I could point my dish at PAS-9 Ku (and hopefully get something) - if I receive even one European sport feed off of this the points I will score with my wife will be astronomical and then I may be able to justify my biggest wish... C-BAND!!!

But this brings me to the whole reason for this thread. I am currently missing the ability to view the many 4:2:2 feeds that appear. So while in Europe I decided I had to get a receiver for this and the best and cheapest solution is a DVB card. I would have purchased a SkyStar 2 from the shop I visited but they were out of stock (I did drool over the QualiTV and Dreambox receivers on the shelf - amazing how much more mature the sat market is over there). Strangely the salesman claimed they weren't making the Skystar 2 anymore???? I'm not sure I believe him. The Technisat website seems very up to date and has it nicely featured.

Anyway, it seems that I can't go too wrong with a cheap card like the Twinhan 102g or the SkyStar 2. Since the Pansat already does the 4:2:0 well I would only use it for 4:2:2. Correct me if I'm wrong but all the <inexpensive> mpeg hardware decoders seem to only do 4:2:0? so I wouldn't need hardware decoders on board. The Twinhan seems easier to get over here so it may be that one. I won't go for ebay on the purchase as there seems to be some shady characters selling new receivers (i.e ~15$ but you pay 50$ shipping!!!!! what is that about?)

I will likely be slaving it to the Pansat and using the Pansat for all blind scanning and motor/LNB control. It seems easy to pick out 4:4:2 feeds with it - audio only with a blocky mess on the screen. How I also connect in the analog receiver is yet to be determined.

My first step will be the DVB card. I will get that working with the old PC hardware and video card. I expect there will be a lot of playing and learning required to get good performance out it. It would seem that there are lots of options on decoders to use - thanks to all of you for showing me some good options on that.

Second step will be a better video card so I can connect it up to my TV (60" HDTV) as I have no interest in watching on a small computer screen.

Third step will be to build a bigger/faster/stronger computer that is capable of decoding HD streams as there seem to more and more HD wild feeds appearing as well. My impressions are that I will need at least a p4 2.4 or 2.8 with a big cache and oodles of memory. Or maybe even faster.

and Beyond? More dishes!!!!

So thanks again to all for the advice and recommendations. You have helped me narrow down quite a few loose ends on what I need to do.

With that specific information, I'd heartily endorse the Twinhan

It should get all you need done at a cheap price, and eventually do the HD stuff you want as well. I only spent $39 or so on this budget MSI videocard (on sale) but it has S-Video out, which I run to the TV; looks/works great. Sounds like you're already very well informed on things Let us know how it works out!

"Do some research. Nexus cards handle 4:2:2 and HD just like the Twinhan line does. A hardware decoder certainly won't hurt, especially with a weak slightly out-of-date system as described. NO card I know of has onboard HD decoding, so steering away from a Nexus for that reason's a bit pointless."

My understanding is the hardware MPEG2 decoder on the Nexus cannot handle HD nor 4:2:2. Sure you can still recieve those signals with the card but you MUST use something else to decode the video as the hardware decoder onboard cannot do it. The whole reason you recommended this card was because of it's onboard hardware decoder. This is it's key selling point and the only real advantage it has over a card like the Twinhan. Therefore considering the fact that just about any modern PC can decode 4:2:0 SD just fine (which is all the Nexus cards onboard decoder can handle). That makes the onboard hardware decoder basically useless and a moot point. The onboard hardware decoder on the nexus card makes it more expensive, more power consuming, and produce more heat. Also, my understanding is the Nexus card doesn't support signals with as High symbol rate as the Twinhan card does. I believe the Twinhan supports symbol rates upto 45Megasamples/sec. Based on this I'd say that not only is the Nexus card no better than the twinhan, but in fact is quite inferior. The reason for this is it was designed back in the Pentium II/ Pentium III era when systems had CPUs running at less than 1Ghz and by todays standards is a outdated design.

"The Nexus/SkyStar1 cards do have an onboard hardware MPEG2 decoder along with video/audio out via composite however it won't output HD or 4:2:2 unless you switch to software mode."

That's exactly what I thought. So, basically the onboard decoder on the Nexus card maxes out and cannot handle anything beyond 4:2:0 SD. Seeing as how just about any PC made in recent years can easily handle 4:2:0 SD that makes the onboard decoder basically useless. Therefore recommending the Nexus, which if I'm not mistaken cost more seems like a bad idea to me.

"Correct me if I'm wrong but all the <inexpensive> mpeg hardware decoders seem to only do 4:2:0? so I wouldn't need hardware decoders on board."

Exactly! That's why I said what I did in my original post. For 4:2:2 on a PC software is about the only reasonable option and as far as I know the only 2 software options are elecards codec or VLC. There may be others but I don't know about them if they exist. As for hardware decoders, I believe there's a company called stradis that makes PCI cards that will do it, but these are generally commercial type products and may be hard to find for the general consumer and most likely cost a great deal.

"Stefan, paying $300 for an external decoder just for 1 HD channel is overkill"

If your only able to recieve 1 HD signal then perhaps that's true. I watch lots of HD on my roku. The Roku will decode HD transport streams from OTA HDTV tuner cards as well. In addition to my Twinhan card, I have a Sasem OnAir usb OTA HDTV tuner and an Air2PC OTA HDTV tuner card and I use both of these cards along with my Twinhan with TSreader to stream HD to the Roku. It works quite well.

"The Roku Idea is not bad but I am waiting for something that will
do newer formats like mpeg 4 H.264."

The Roku doesn't handle Mpeg 4. The are a few new products somewhat similar to the Roku which show promise of supporting Mpeg4. However, based on the specs I've seen from those products they don't seem to support the high bitrate MPEG2 streams the Roku can. I've used my Roku successfully with streams upto 40MBit. Rumor has it that the ATI Xellion processor used in the Roku can handle 4:2:2 but ATI has never enabled this feature. Therefore the Roku doesn't support 4:2:2 either.

" That's got to be the most backwards way of going about a purchase I've ever heard, lol Sure, do some research, but do you ask the guy who sells floor mats what car goes best with them? lol..."

Sorry, but we're not alking about floor mats or cars here. What we are talking about is software and software makes API calls to the operating system which then in turn may make calls to functions in a device driver or may emulate those functions in software. Furthermore the device driver itself may perform some functions in hardware or in software or a combination of both. Graphs are just an abstraction to make things easier for humans to visualise. Your CPU doesn't know anything about or care anything about graphs. It only knows instructions and data. Anyway, asking a software developer what hardware will make his software perform best makes perfect sense, as the software developer will best know the inner workings of his or her own code and what function and API calls it makes. Therefore the software developer will likely know whether a feature a particular piece of hardware might supports will accelerate his code or not. Also software developers generally test their code and quite frequently do so on differing hardware. So, they are likely to have some insight on how it performs on different hardware.