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tlarkin · 05-02-2007, 06:30 AM

Are you stuck on getting vista? I know a way to cut the money down and still have a rock solid entertainment/DVR computer. It would require a decent spec machine (not too high) a TV tuner card, Linux, and mythtv. Myth TV is a very powerful multimedia application that can record cable TV, automatically edit out commericals as it records, stream audio/video over a network, has a built in video game emulator so you can play all your old classic games, has adaptive AI - meaning it learns from your actions and will keep your recording options as you go, acutally I will just list the features from the website

Quote:

MythTV has a number of capabilities. The television portion allows you to do the following:

* You may pause, fast-forward and rewind live Television.
* You may install multiple video capture cards to record more than one program at a time.
* You can have multiple servers, each with multiple capture cards in them. All servers are centrally managed and all programs are scheduled by the Master backend.
* You can have multiple clients (called "frontends" in MythTV parlance), each with a common view of all available programs. Any client can watch any program that was recorded by any of the servers, assuming that they have the hardware capabilities to view the content; a low-powered frontend will not be able to watch HDTV, for example. Clients can be diskless and controlled entirely by a remote control.
* You may use any combination of standard analog capture card, MPEG-2, MJPEG, DVB, HDTV, USB and firewire capture devices. With appropriate hardware, MythTV can control set top boxes, often found in digital cable and satellite TV systems.
* Program Guide Data in North America is downloaded from Zap2It.com, a subsidiary of Tribune Media Services. This free service is called DataDirect, and provides MythTV almost two weeks of scheduling information. Program Guide Data in other countries is obtained using XMLTV. MythTV uses this information to create a schedule that maximizes the number of programs that can be recorded if you don't have enough tuners.
* MythTV implements a UPNP server, so a UPNP client should automatically see content from your MythTV system.

Other modules in MythTV include:

* MythArchive, a tool to create DVDs
* MythBrowser, a web browser
* MythControls, an application to configure your remote control
* MythDVD, a DVD viewer / ripper
* MythFlix, a Netflix module
* MythGallery, a picture-viewing application
* MythGame
* MythMusic, a music playing / ripping application which supports MP3 and FLAC
* MythNews, a RSS news grabber
* MythPhone, phone and videophone using SIP.
* MythVideo, a media-viewer for content not created within MythTV
* MythWeather
* MythWeb, which allows you to control your MythTV system using a web browser. With MythWeb, you can schedule and delete recordings, change keybindings and more. With proper security, you may even schedule a program over the Internet and have it immediately acted on by the scheduler.

here is the home page

http://mythtv.org/index.php

If I actually had HD cable and a HD TV I would totally build one of these boxes. It was works on OS X if you have a mac. You can also install it on your Xbox 360 which is also pretty pimp.