Wednesday, August 09, 2006

A Forgotten Myth

So I haven't fallen off the earth, I've just been really busy and not posting. Anyway I've been working on two projects, a software program to track food storage and a mythtv box. Since the mythtv box will probably be finished first, I'll talk about that.

I've been wanting a Tivo or something similar for some time now. While I don't watch much tv, the few shows I do want to watch seem to be on when I need to put my kids to bed. A VCR would work, but I wanted to be able to say "record all of antiques roadshow" without knowing exactly when it would be on. (Utah has 2 PBS channels) So I decided to build a computer that could record TV. Unfortunately the VHF reception my house is bad, so I decided to opt for DTV (digital TV) because it tends to run in the UHF frequency which I can get pretty well. (Did you know all broadcast signals are supposed to be digital by 2009? Did you know most tvs for sale today can't handle it?) I decided to run Fedora Core 5 (Linux) with mythTv to handle the media center side of things. MythTv is supposed to be really great, but it takes forever to set up.

Anyway for under $500 I'll have my computerized home entertainment center and a great PC.

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