My MythTV Box

My MythTV box has finally come together. After My Big Bad PC sold I purchased myself a Hauppauge PVR350 (TV Tuner Card, MPEG Encoder/Decoder), Chaintech AV710 (Highly rated sound card w/ 5.1 surround), and an Antec Overture II (PC Case designed for Home Theatre Systems). I ended up using my general purpose server for the task, which has plenty of juice. I followed the Gentoo MythTV HOWTO, which was incredibly helpful. And it would have been an easy upgrade if it wasn't for Gentoo going through a pretty significant GCC upgrade (3.3 to 3.4) and my server install is about 4 years old and some old orphaned libraries were hanging around.

Now that its setup and running I'm really happy with it. Watching live TV, setting up and watching recordings, it's all a breeze. The only complaints I have are (1) changing channels takes a few seconds and (2) when going into mythtv while a recording is in progress you can't just go to watch live tv and pick up the recording from there, you have to go to the recordings menu, but if you are already watching live tv and a scheduled recording begins you don't have to go back through the recordings menu, you can just continue watching.

A really neat thing is you can manage your recordings from a web interface so even if I'm not home, as long as I can get to the internet, I can setup recordings.