I’m not much of a TV watcher yet I appreciate devices like the TiVO and DVRs and have always wanted one. The problem is, sometimes I’m really cheap, I don’t want to pay for a TiVO and I really don’t want to pay a recurring fee just to get a program guide. Being the techie geek I am I also want to be able to watch recorded TV shows on other devices and again, pay nothing for it.
MythTV to the rescue. (http://mythtv.org)
MythTV has existed for a number of years now and I’ve given it a try multiple times. Each time I gave up on it any one of a few reasons and it usually could have been resolved by throwing more money at the project. I usually hit two snags with my MythTV setup. One of the reasons was, where do I put a loud computer that isn’t too far away to hook up to the TV (for those times when I *did* want to watch a show on the TV) but most of the time it was because I didn’t have enough computing power to do transcoding, better known as, the ability to pause live TV. This was a real bummer to me because it’s one of the key features of any DVR, any VCR can record a TV show, but only a DVR can pause live TV.