Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. I was away in San Diego for vacation. I am building a web page to describe the trip… should be done soon. In the meantime, here’s an exceedingly nerdy post.

Upon return, I received my Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-350 from Amazon. This weekend I got it set up and am now successfully running MythTV under Linux.

A few weeks ago, I got Linux running on my old machine from college (600 Mhz P3) added a free network card to it, and got it running as a home router and DHCP server. I can also use it as a CVS/Web/FTP server, which freed up my other computer for this MythTV project.

What this MythTV thing basically allows me to do is use my computer like a TiVo. The WinTV card has onboard MPEG-2 encoding and decoding, which means it can record and display TV shows with very little use of the local computer’s CPU. The TV-guide functionality is free from XMLTV, so there are no service fees.

The program is pretty cool. My favorite part so far is that because it’s based on a client-server architecture, you can actually stream TV shows to other computers on the network. It has a number of other features and plugins (image gallery, weather reports, web browsing, even a news feed reader so I can read these dumb blogs on the TV).

For right now the computer is in my room, but eventually I’m going to hook it up to the TV. That will involve doing some work on silencing the computer so it’s living-room friendly. Optionally, you can also hack up an X-box to sit in the living room, and stream the TV shows to it. I kind of like that idea, but it’s a little more expensive than making an existing PC quiet.

If anyone wants to do this themselves, there’s a pretty nice guide here that helped me out tremendously.