(I did get outside and enjoy the wonderful weather every day this weekend, just so it doesn't sound like I spent all my time inside doing the following :)
Since my last post, I bought a Hauppauge HVR-1600 ATSC/QAM/NTSC capture card, and spoke with a friend who has been using MythTV for a couple of years, and he gave me some tips, including mythbuntu.org to get a customized Ubuntu distribution for Myth. My initial attempts at using the card with Linux were not great - after reading some forums, I tried out using some different firmware, using a modified Linux kernel, and updating some drivers. Installing the Mythbuntu distribution helped some, but I still couldn't get video that wasn't choppy and pixelated.
On Saturday though, all my plans got changed, because one of the other 5 computer's in my house (Erin's) crashed. After some quick triage, I was fairly certain I knew what the problem was - there was a generation of motherboards that had a motherboard "chip" which apparently offloaded some of the basic motherboard duties to hardware. The problem with the ones I've encountered (and read about) is that the small fans they put on these chips are very cheap and crappy and tend to go out easily. Usually, if your case has proper cooling and ventilation, you don't really need the little chip fan, but eventually something happens and the chip overheats and dies. Thus a perfectly good motherboard in all other respects is now completely worthless (thanks ASUS). Fortunately, the "spare" machine I had been doing all the MythTV messing around on had a motherboard with the same processor socket. It took a fair amount of Saturday to get everything all taken apart and put back together (including a Windows 7 re-install and all the apps) but everybody's computers are happy again. And, one of the funniest/weirdest things is that the 6-year-old motherboard/processor that I "retired" is now "un-retired" to be the backup server again...but I digress...
Back to the media stuff...I decided that without a spare computer, the next best option was to put the Hauppauge card in my super-power i7 desktop since it has more than enough power to handle recording a show and still being my desktop machine. So after cleaning up the mess from all the computer re-organizing, I put in the card and installed the software. The card definitely works better on Windows (usually the case with newer stuff). Windows Media Center did a channel scan and found all my channels, downloaded guide data, and I added all the shows I wanted to record. It says I have 43 hours of HD capacity, which should probably be good enough for now.
I tried watching from another of the Windows 7 machines and it seems to work quite easily once you add the primary machine's video directory to your media list.
A couple of downsides of using Media Center...one is that doesn't seem to let you use network drives as storage - for me that's bad because there's a lot more storage on the server. I have read about some hacks which allow you to get around this, but it seems dumb that they only allow local storage by default. Another (for me anyway) is that it seems fairly incompatible with anything else - you can use Microsoft media extenders like an XBox or other Windows machines to watch content, but it does not have a UPnP server or something that would extend universally to other clients (like my PS3).
Another advantage of having the capture card installed on my machine is that it can also take in other audio/video inputs, so I hooked it up to my VCR - I still have several tapes that I have not converted to digital, and the tapes have gotten degraded enough where some of the other methods I've tried to capture the video have not worked well. I tried one portion of a tape I know was among the oldest, and while the quality isn't perfect, it is good enough to watch - the sound and video all lined up and there was no choppiness. So I may be finally finishing that project.
Next on the list to try is Boxee - my friend Eric showed this to me on Saturday. It is a front-end TV "aggregator" of sorts - keeps track of finding content on the internet and in your media library. Does not appear to hook up directly with WMC, but has lots of other great features.
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