[mythtv-users] Why did you pick MythTV VS the other PVRs?

[Paul Bender]

Reliability and convenience. More specifically, RAID and MythTV's 
distributed architecture.

We had a Series 1 TiVo with a lifetime subscription.

Since my wife lives on the phone, I added a TiVoNET board along with the 
needed software so that TiVo could not possibly interfere with the 
telephone.

Since my wife's work compelled her to record more than a season's worth 
of her shows, I upgraded the one small hard disk to two 150GB hard disks 
(limited to 137GB each by the the kernel). Since that was not enough, I 
upgraded the two 150GB hard disks to two 300GB hard disks along with the 
kernel to support larger hard disks.

When one of the 300GB hard disks crashed with more than a season's worth 
of multiple shows, the the TiVo's WAF plummeted.

I had been using MythTV for my own amusement because of my own beliefs. 
I believed that the separate, distributed backend/frontend architecture 
was the right thing. In addition, I believed that network booting of 
diskless frontends was the right thing (which led me to become involved 
in MiniMyth).

I mentioned to my wife that were we to use MythTV instead of TiVo, we 
could RAID the drives. As a result of RAID, a drive failure would not 
cause a loss of recordings. From that moment on, the household switched 
from TiVo to MythTV.