I got the schedules working last night for my new MythTV setup and quickly fell in love with my MythTV. Sure, Tivo’s been doing this stuff for ten years now, but to have it on my home-built machine, with my own hardware, for a yearly subscription fee of $20 rather than a monthly fee? I’m sold!
I’m amazed at how many interesting shows are on that I had no clue about until I got a scheduler. Even basic cable has a lot of shows. Seinfeld may show at 2AM but it doesn’t matter as I’ll catch it every time. This kind of TV watching shold some day make TV networks redundant. Cable TV systems could fall victim, too, I suppose.
The analog tuner card seems to work just fine for most of my channels. Call it another benefit of living near downtown: we’re close to the cable headend! Still, there are a few channels which didn’t get properly loaded: cable channels 5 and six – CSPAN and NBC 17. There’s a trick to picking the right cable settings when Myth is told to scan channels. I just haven’t picked the right selection yet.
With such impressive results from one analog tuner, I’m itching to add some HD tuners like SiliconDust’s HD Homerun, or one of the (supported) Hauppauge cards. I’m also fixing up the MythTV frontend for my Mac Mini, which is hooked up to the HDTV. That way I can watch all my media streamed over the network to the big screen. Media Geek heaven!
I really love how mythbuntu just works. Installing it was the first time I’ve not had to do any special compiling to get mythtv to work.
Also, the Myth frontend on my macbook just basically worked. I even installed it on Janell’s MacBook last summer so she could watch the Tour De Cure which I had saved on the mythbox.