[mythtv-users] two and one

[Ben Bucksch]

Adam Hirsch wrote:

>1) I'm curious as to what brings people to try out MythTV.  Is it the geeky pleasure of building something oneself?  Is it wanting to be independent from TiVo's feature control or fate?  Is it cost?  Is it the extra features that one can't get from the commercial PVRs out there?
>
I want total "convergence" as Isaac would call it.

My desktop is connected to good speakers and a TV anyways for gaming, 
and it can play videos. It seems pointless not to use it for TV, but to 
have a separate devices for video and TV tuning. Those are legacy crap 
for me. Having only one (visible) machine for everything (work, 
shopping, gaming, music, TV etc.) is just elegant.

The desktop should be minimal, so having nasty TV hardware there is out 
of question. I don't want to have TV cables around the house either, 
ethernet should be enough and it is. So, it had to be a client/server 
solution. MythTV is one of the very few ones, at least the first I saw 
(meanwhile, there are commercial client/server solutions). Nice side 
effect is that any computer is also a TV.

I don't like TiVo, because they try to lock me in. Into their service, 
their hardware (expensive and small disk drives, IIRC) and worst of all 
they think my recordings are their property or something. That is 
totally out of question for me. I like the freedom of open source - if I 
don't like something, I can always change it. I can't change everything 
I don't like (time, of course), but chances are that somebody else did 
it for me already.

I absolutely hate having to spend 1 week or more to build something like 
that (and I did, answering your other question). That's just not 
economic, and it annoys me. But it's unfortunately the reality of Linux 
at the moment, at least in my experience (I spent most of the time for 
the hardware, not MythTV, BTW).