[mythtvnz] Another one

[Craig Box]

Hi all,

I started running MythTV a couple of years ago, when a friend had a PVR-350
card at work to play with, so I thought if I could get a box up and running
I might buy one of my own.

My first attempt was with Gentoo on a 1Ghz-ish Celeron, trying with both the
loaned PVR-350 and a bttv card.  The entire experiment was a complete mess
and I prefer not to speak of any further 

The machine that the PVR-350 came out of ran on Fedora Core 1, so I copied
the disk to my machine.  Never got the PVR-350 working properly (I think the
TV output was the bit holding us back then), but managed to get the bttv
card going.  The performance was substandard, so I acquired a 2Ghz Celeron
and it has been running fine ever since.  No HTPC case here; the machine is
hidden behind the TV and never needs to be seen.

I ran Fedora up through Core 3, but found it was a bit unreliable -
sometimes it would lose picture, sometimes it would record an hour of green
(with sound at least).  I changed to Ubuntu Hoary about 3 months ago, since
upgraded to breezy, and have had no problems at all.

I have a cheapo Dynalink TV card, a serial receiver that I use a universal
remote on, and a Geforce 4 MX for TV output.  Since we have Sky Digital, I
never watch TV through it and only record TV every now and then.  I'd go
Bert Badger before doing anything else to the recording setup.  I'm far more
interested in the 'play back things I've downloaded' aspect of the program,
although I have some serious complaints about the way the program is
engineered (for example, why can't I just browse a filesystem in the video
player?  Why does it take an hour to 'scan for new music' on my nfs share?)

In short, it's a good program, especially if you're a developer, but I'm
not, and there's not much development happening on the bits I use, so I'd
like to find an alternative.  But until then, it will do fine.  If anyone
has any questions, especially related to getting LIRC running on
Debian/Ubuntu, I'm happy to help.

Craig