[plug] MythTV project

[home at oranges.id.au]

I'm going to be lazy and just tell you some relevant parts of my
story. You can draw useful meaning if you're willing :P

I have a second-hand (work discard) AMD 3500+ in a nice quiet Antec
case with a crappy noisy 1" motherboard fan. Such is life - it's often
fine. It powers itself down when not recording or watching TV to save
power and noise (http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/ACPI_Wakeup). I think it
has a NVidia GeForce 5200 for the output to our 32" CRT, no complaints
there.

Storage is to a 160GB SATA, and programs autoexpire at a level that
we're never chasing a program that has been deleted. We've even told a
couple of movies not to autoexpire so we're running at more like
120GB.

Apparently there is a range of signal reception between different
chipsets and cards. My Leadtek DTV2000DS ($64 from MSY in Osborne Park
last last year) works pretty well, but not quite as well as our old
set top box, so it forced me to replace our old falling-apart roof
antenna (woohoo $60 on ebay).

Mythbuntu 10.04 just works... except that I had to compile a newer v4l
(I think, from memory) to get the Leadtek working. The supplied remote
doesn't work so far, but my Dad's MCE USB remote works out of the box,
no effort whatsoever.

I tinkered with auto downloaded tv guides but in the end just get them
over the air (can't remember the terms), they're pretty reliable and
accurate. Sometimes have to modify a program to record a few minutes
past the end.

My setup has high WAF, e.g. since it recorded a Spicks & Specks
episode out of the blue when we weren't actively recording it; and
we're no longer chained to the timing of when shows are on. We just
watch whatever we feel like from the recorded shows.

Good luck!
Greg.

-- 
Gregory Orange