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Anand builds a MythTV

Kristopher Kubicki of Anandtech.com has gone to some considerable work and effort to document the building of a SuSE Linux-based MythTV PVR using a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250MCE for the TV tuner card. He summarizes:

And finally, after several hours of turmoil and despair, we have installed and tested our Linux device. Its far from perfect - we cannot readily work with digital TV broadcasts, for example. What we do have is a machine that will readily emulate all of the basic Windows MCE or TiVo functionality at a reduced cost - and we can hack/configure/manipulate it to any extent that we wish to in the future. On the downside, it did take us over four hours to set up and install everything.
...
Other drawbacks of MCE devices include the inability to play back the video content on anything but other MCE devices, and the inability to re-render the recorded files into a different format to save space. With MythTV and Linux, on the other hand, we can capture, re-encode and playback on completely separate machines, even Windows systems. For the truly crafty, Myth allows us to connect the front end of a different machine to the first MythTV system and play video files/streams in that manner.

Me? I'd buy a Tivo and be done with it :)

Building a Linux PVR [Anandtech.com]

by Gen Kanai September 6, 2004 in Products

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