Hard drive free DVR - possible?

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

I am looking at this $14 16 GB USB Flash drive:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...255&SID=208090

And wondering if I might be able to use it, or two of them, to build a basic, hard drive free, Linux based DVR?

Several folks have told me that this can't be done - that you need a true hard drive to build a DVR of any type. The thing is, we would probably just keep the latest episode or two of Jeopardy on there, so we wouldn't need much room at all. I see no need for more than a few hours of recording time, so wouldn't a single flash drive work, or perhaps one for the OS, and a second one for storage?

I already know people have installed Linux successfully on flash drives, so I guess this question really has 2 parts:

A) Are there any of these Linux installs that are both flash drive
friendly and also include what you need to run as a DVR?


B) Are there any TV Tuners that would work with the flash drive without
any trouble? (USB or otherwise, pretty much universally supported)

I have one of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16856119012

Which I bought for about $100. (foxconn mini pc system) I have 2 gigs of ram to pop in there, and have thought that I might use this as a basis for some sort of DVR. My wife would love it if we could somehow record Jeopardy over the air. I have a 24" AOC Spectrum monitor I can hook up to it, but I guess I might have to get a PCI video card in order to use it for this purpose. (unless you know of some way to use VGA out on an LCD monitor that only has DVI and HDMI inputs)

So, what are my prospects? My experience with Linux is pretty much limited to installing Ubuntu as a dual boot with Windows 7, plus doing a basic Ubuntu USB stick install once.

Can anyone recommend what I might need in order to get this to work? Thanks!

 

[dfuze]

I can't see what you have since my work is blocking the redirect link (really annoying), but can guess from the descriptions. Going from my own experience using a TV card on a couple of my computers I don't see why you can't save the program to a usb drive as long as the tv program sees it as storage. My concern would be that the read and write speeds of going to and from USB might affect the quality. If you already have a hard drive in the foxconn system I would suggest just using that especially if you are just doing a couple of 1/2 hr shows from your post.

 

[sdifox]

problem with stick is they have comparatively limited rewrite cycles. Also, write speed on cheap usb drives is not idea.

HDDs are dirt cheap compared to usb sticks. Why the hate on hdd?