I'm too cheap to buy a Tivo. Luckily the products of the Ubuntu Linux Distribution and MythTV have been binded together to form Mythbuntu.
After a week of configuring it I finally have a fully functioning Personal Video Recorder (PVR aka DVR).
Some great features include a web interface I can access from the web, anywhere in the world, TV listings and searches, commercial recognition and other features such as RSS support and local weather reports. No need to stay up late watching hours of TV plagued with commercials. All I do set mythbuntu to record my show, then watch it at a convenient time and when commercials come up I hit the Z button and good-bye commercials.
Mythbuntu offers the same user friendly distribution installation that Ubuntu does and can also convert an existing Ubuntu system into a Mythbuntu one. There are certain requirements which can be found on the site. 1 GHZ of processor (CPU) gets you one stream. IE if you have a 2.0 GHZ computer and two TV capture cards then you can record two shows simultaneously. It also takes up a lot of hard drive space. I'm averaging 1.5 Gigabyte per 30 minute show. Having a wireless keyboard and mouse comes in handy and so would a remote control, had my TV card come with one.
The biggest challenges for me was configuring my video card. I have an ATI Radeon 9600. I used the linux proprietary drivers from AMD (read ATI). Instead of being able to use the nice friendly GUI that comes with Mythbuntu I had to use the command line utility aticonfig. After hours (days really) of trying this and that I managed to put together a configuration that now has the computer outputting nicely to the TV.
Another obstacle I ran into was loading the TV listings. By default Mythbuntu tells you to sign up for an account with a third party and pay $20/year for tv listings. Again I don't want to pay for that and so I searched for a free way to get TV listings. I ended up using a Perl script called zap2xml which grabs the listings of the internet from http://tvlistings.zap2it.com and loads them into the MythTV database. You can find the how-to here.
All-in-all I am quite happy with the results and after a bit of hacking and frustration I am enjoying commercial free television when I choose to watch it!
Here are some nerds talking about about the features and benefits of MythTV:
Links:
http://www.mythbuntu.org/
