On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 6:10 PM, Thomas Lunde <tlunde at gmail.com> wrote: > Mike - > > Step 1. Buy a HD HomeRun > Step 2. Install Mythbuntu > > There is no step 3 > > ;-) > > Thomas Well, step 3, is beat your head against stupid bugs in mythTV over and over again. Its not exactly user-friendly, or well tested, outside of the scope of how a couple of the main maintainers use it. If your use case differs well, you don't get a lot of help. That said... I've been running an installation for a few years now on a purpose-built system. It mostly works well - if your reception is good. I get most channels, but not all, OTA. We probably only use it for OTA recording about 1/3 of the time anyway. The rest of the time - that system is used for playing Hulu or whatever in a webbrowser on the computer. Or watching movies that I have archived there with Handbrake. I have a http://hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hvr2250.html and a http://hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hvr1600.html They both work well with modern linux distros these days. The remote control that comes with the 2250 works well. But a HDHomeRun is even easier to configure as a capture device, so I'm told. Wasn't out yet when I built mine - and at the time, I still needed to record some analog signals - so thats why I got the 1600 as well. Stick with NVidia video cards. MythTV can fully utilize them for decoding HD via VDPAU. So you don't need much horsepower on the rest of the system. No idea what the state of the world is for Intel / ATI. Probably not good. Check the specs on the MythTV site to make sure you get a video card with enough horsepower to do full HD decoding on the card. When I was looking - I couldn't find a fanless card that could do it. HD Video runs about 6GB per hour OTA. Plan your disk space accordingly. Getting 5.1 channel audio set up from a S/PDIF / toslink connection out of the back of the computer to your external speakers can be tricky. But it does work. Pretty cool getting full HD video and 5.1 channel surround sound off of a pair of rabbit ears. For watching a video collection the MythVideo portion can be rather maddening as well, when it decides that your programs actually have a different name. Sigh. But once you bite the bullet, and dedicate a computer to your TV, you can also install XBMC for watching your video collection. We really haven't watched "tv" in our house since I built it.