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.<\/p>\n
Upon return, I received my Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-350<\/a> from Amazon. This weekend I got it set up and am now successfully running MythTV<\/a> under Linux.<\/p>\n A few weeks ago, I got Linux running on my old machine from college (600 Mhz P3) added a free<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, so there are no service fees.<\/p>\n 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).<\/p>\n 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<\/a> the computer so it’s living-room friendly. Optionally, you can also hack up an X-box<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n