MythTV Compared with Windows Media Center

legoburner writes "Tom's Hardware has a nice comparison of MythTV and Windows Media Center Edition, and it seems that they preferred MythTV by quite a margin: 'Enter MythTV, a grand unification of personal digital video recording and home theatre technology, and a magnum opus of modular design, freedom of expression and personal entertainment.'"

what would be really nice

Good news Tom's Hardware picks MythTV over Windows MCE (Media Center Edition), but maybe not so much a surprise. Tom's Hardware's preference isn't going to mean a lick to the general consumers. I can't tell my neighbors MythTV is bitchin' because they're not going to have a clue how do it themselves, and I'm running out of support hours and don't have time to set up everyone with MythTV, let alone support it afterwards.

What would be really cool is if some company pulled a Red Hat, or Suse, etc., with MythTV whereby they offer their "version" of a MythTV distribution bundled with hardware and all. With minor standardization, it's a product that could spark consumer interest. This would offer an alternative to the always present MS MCE, and an interesting competition (potentially) with TiVo.

Re:what would be really nice

"Some company" would become shark bait the minute that there was deemed sufficient revenue for the shark school to mount a campaign of intellectual property conquest.

Rich media experiences are a Faustian bargain. The EULA is an abstract goatskin, and that's your blood you're click/signing.

The reality is that the bulk of people are perfectly content to sign over to a proprietary vendor.

Paraphrasing Mellencamp: "Free Software goes on, long after the thrill of getting mugged by the proprietary vendor is gone".

Re:what would be really nice

It's called KnoppMyth

http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html [mysettopbox.tv]

KnoppMyth is freaking awesome

I have some experience with Linux ... I've played with Ubuntu, Red Hat, DreamLinux, and Freespire on my brother's PC, so I only ever get occassional exposure. I'm good with the OS X command line, but don't use it for day to day tasks usually. I'm familiar with apt-get and Synaptic and can usually work around dependency problems.

however, getting MythTV running on my brother's box proved to be really, REALLY difficult.

Enter KnoppMyth.

20 minute install and 10 minutes to configure. And it all just worked. I'm sold.

Plus, he can use his main machine, a Tiger-running Mac, as a front end as well. Its terriffic. Download it. NOW.

Re:what would be really nice

whereas most end users have a rudimentary knowledge of Windows and can fix small things when they break.

I really wonder where people get this impression. Most people can't even change their resolution in Windows, although that seems to be something people bitch about with Linux. Most people don't even realize they are missing drivers when (if) they take the plunge and decide to reinstall windows because "it is slow". A lot of users cannot even install applications in Windows, even if it is the "next, next, finish" type.

Re:what would be really nice

They didn't even choose which is better. The only mention in the article of MCE 2004 is on the last page, where they list a few differences, but there's nothing there to say that they prefer MythTV, let alone by "quite a margin".

http://tomshardware.co.uk/2006/09/08/the_mythtv_co nvergence_uk/page4.html [tomshardware.co.uk]

It's a horrendously misleading article summary, and it shouldn't have been posted. I can only surmise that the editor didn't look at the submission, either that or they don't care that it's so misleading.

Re:what would be really nice

What would be really cool is if some company pulled a Red Hat, or Suse, etc., with MythTV whereby they offer their "version" of a MythTV distribution bundled with hardware and all

There are a couple of small vendors who do this already. The systems all seem to be priced to compete with the various Commercial PVR-type systems -- $600-1200.

While searching for Ubuntu & MythTV, I ran into https://monolithmc.com/ [monolithmc.com], who I ships a computer preloaded with MythTV & Ubuntu.

Tivo still wins on user interface

I've used just about everything on the planet and the one thing I keep going back to is my Tivo. The user interface on it is simple, intuitive and it just plain works. The add ons like photos, music, and even movies from other PC's in the house is super simple to work out.

My only complaint is that because of the way the remote is shaped, it's easy to pick up backward in the dark. That's really saying something when that's the only bad thing I can come up with. Their support has always been awesome and the devices have gotten so darn cheap, there's no reason not to have a real Tivo. I've seen them on sale here for $49.99.

2 cents,

QueenB

PS: No, I don't work for Tivo. I just really like mine.

Re:Tivo still wins on user interface

Actually the grandparent is correct. The TiVo can transfer any MPEG2 encoded video file from a PC running the TiVo Desktop software (or Galleon). The video file can be viewed while it is transferring. It works very well. The downside is that since TiVo only supports MPEG2, the file sizes are quite large and the transfer time can take a while. The TiVo S3, which is supposed to be released in about a week can play MPG4 formatted videos, but it hasn't been confirmed whether it will support the PC to TiVo video transfer feature.

MythTV could be great.

....but it is not because it is too difficult to install and set up. I am not trying to start a flame war, but I have been using Linux for years (so I am not a total noob) and decided to Give MythTV a try. After months of work and changing TV tuner cards 3 times I gave up. MythTV will never be any competition to Windows MCE until you can just put in a disk, answer a few yes or no questions and then start using it.

Re:MythTV could be great.

Let me speak on both sides. I have been running Linux since 1994, and am not a noob by any stretch of the imagination. I just built a mythtv box, and things are bother better and worse that you might expect. First I chose to buy a PVR-150 card, and to use ubuntu as a base. Both decisions made the process much easier than it would have been otherwise. Most of the set-up was just adding the correct repositories and typing apt-get install. EXCEPT for getting the ivtv drivers running. I have no idea why there is no pre-compiled driver for ivtv for ubuntu. The instructions on the howto pages are detailed about which version of the ivtv driver to use, and how to compile it, so why not just have it available as a pre-compiled module. (I know why don't I pre-compile them and make them available) If the compiled ivtv module was available it would have taken less than 30 minutes to have everything up and running.

Overall I think that the thing that will hold Linux back from becoming really widely deployed is the lack of automation for simple tasks. I wanted to burn a DVD from a show that I recorded in mythtv. I can find several good recipes, including in the mythtv documentation, about how to do it. If it is so easy to write a detailed list of how to do something, then why not automate it.

Huh?

But what is it...good for? Like a lot of people here (I imagine), I have a PC that outputs to a TV and a stereo. If I click on the movie a movie starts playing. If I click on the album the music starts playing. I've already learned the interfaces to these programs, I don't see a need for a suite of programs to accomplish something that any modern OS can already do anyway.

Everything else seems pointless. Installing modules to give weather reports? Like a lot of people, I can just click "home" in firefox. This is a solution in search of a problem.

Commercial usage?

Has the MythTV community thought about developing a community-based real, physical product? E.g., a cheap system with a decent hard drive, decent tuner card, and comes with everything already installed?

Re:Commercial usage?

There are a few companies out there offering solutions on a small scale. Not the best deal, but if you want support you pay for support. https://monolithmc.com/catalog.php [monolithmc.com] http://mythic.tv/product_info.php?cPath=21_29&prod ucts_id=44&osCsid=1adfce851bdfddf0bd199eded2ddf5eb [mythic.tv] Personally I'd just build my own on KnoppMyth and be done with it, but whatever floats your boat.

GRUP, not MythTV

"Enter MythTV, a grand unification of personal digital video recording and home theatre technology, and a magnum opus of modular design, freedom of expression and personal entertainment.'"

I'm sorry that would not be MythTV, it would be GRUPDVRHTT or GRUP for short. Not that long, unpronounceable names have ever stopped OSS project developers from using them before.

Sub $500 HD-PVR?

I'm glad this showed up here. I'm currently in the market for a HD-PVR, in the market since I convinced the financial adviser (wife) that I could build one for less then $500. Now I just have to build one. Any good sources for parts, including a case and remote?

Some comparison...

They compared MythTV to MCE 2004, which is over two years old. Comparison with MCE 2005 rollup 2 would have been more appropriate.

On top of that, they failed to go into any sort of interesting detail *and* ignored every other media thingymabob out there like MediaPortal, SageTV, etc.

I hope the follow-up articles they're promising make up for it but this is a disappointing article from the likes of Tom's...

This is a great opportunity for open source

This is a chance to get the message out about open source to a wider crowd. Firefox was a good start, but watching TV is something that gets almost everyone interested, not just computer users. And open source has a strong tactical position - while all the companies have a vested interested in pushing their formats and restricting you with their DRM, open source has no reason not to support as many file formats as possible and giving the user complete control.

This is a great opportunity to make some inroads into the consciousness of the average consumer.

Bad title!

1) Its an article about MythTV which doesn't even really mention MS Media Center except in one small table at the very end
2) The table mentioned above compares Myth against MCE 2004 not MCE 2005 which has been out forever, MCE 2005 R2 which has been out for some time, or Vista which is almost here.

Article in a nutshell

Features in MythTV that are not in Windows MCE 2004:
- Open Source; free to obtain, use, and modify
- Software and hardware decoding support
- Output to DivX and MPEG2
- Runs on Linux and MacOS, feeds to Windows (Windows MCE runs on -- guess what -- Windows only!)
- Ultra-low system requirements
- Support for companion and third-party plug-ins
- Scalable network architecture (master/slaves) (MCE has only basic TCP/IP support)
- Record once, transcode and play anywhere (in MCE you can only record and play using the same device)

Features in Windows MCE not in MythTV:
- Simple setup and configuration

Guess which one will have the biggest market share?

Question about 2 locations

I know it isn't ask slashdot; but does anybody here know how to put 1 Mythbox in one loaction and have it record,
sync/copy/backup the HD and put in an another Mythbox for viewing (the two are not connected in any way) ?
I tried several FAQs and forums and I reaaly don't seem to find an answer. thx

Why I love mythtv...

It enables me to make the ideal media setup, for me.

The potential for separation of backend and frontend allows me to have my loud, big, lots-o-storage system somewhere far away from my TV, and a quiet, yet affordable box with my TV.

My frontend is nothing but a micro ATX case with a motherboard (ASUS A8N-VM CSM), processor (Athlon XP64 3000), and 1 512M DIMM. No hard drive, no extra video card, booting diskless. Thanks to the linux base I'm able to PXE boot, and have a tmpfs root with about 40M of ram used, and nfs mount usr. Now I have a really slick frontend that I can sleep and resume, and it comes up in less time than my TV takes to turn on its lamp right back to whatever menu I left it at, but still have no hard disk whatsoever in it. It's very quiet, and passes the WAF test. The kind of power and flexibility I can get out of a mythtv on linux solution is far beyond anything that involves Windows (try having a fully persistant-storage free (including optical drives or usb storage) windows box that can run MCE and serve reliably as a frontend, persisting through all sorts of activity including sleep... My backend records OTA HD and uses a free service to get TV listings, no subscription, has everything stored on a software RAID5 with 4 250GB disks, and I can access it to make scheduling changes from anywhere via the web if someone say recommends a show while I'm at work. Can also download other media (i.e. fansubs), dump them in a particular directory tree, and the frontend can access it in an easy-to-use interface as well.

One thing I will say is that for more exotic configs, it naturally takes more work to set up than probably other things do, and in allowing the exotic configuration, a lot of confusing options end up facing the novice user (kinda like vi vs. notepad). Also, as it is only part of a full solution, it can't even simplify some config options because it quite frankly has no idea if the user will have a remote, if so what remote, if they will use a keyboard, maybe a joystick, if a joystick no idea on the keymapping... If it will be running backend and frontend type tasks on the same box, if separate the frontend may not know where the master backend is... It has various playback options that work better depending on your video card and such, and while they have a 'decent' default behavior, it doesn't de-interlace by default, doesn't enable any sort of sync to vblank by default, and doesn't enable XvMC by default, because it can't assume any of these are wanted or will perform right with the frontend's hardware. It could be assissted by a discovery architecture for the frontend (if localhost not responding, discover backends), and maybe a hardware/configuration database where it uses, say, lspci data and checks for XvMCConfig and other config files to have a better guess as to what the user can do, but it shouldn't sacrifice the power of it's configurability whatever may happen.

Once configured, it's slick and easy to use, no one has ever been confused by the interface that's used it at my house, I've never had to answer any questions pertaining to usage and once I got everything behaving correctly, I haven't had to touch configuration. Other people have scheduled recordings without being confused or anything, and that's about the hardest task left to do with the frontend. It could be leveraged as a part of a pre-configured solution where hardware and software config is already known (last I heard MCE had particular config requirements, so mythtv's ability to cope with a wider config probably contributes to this criticism).

Building a MythTV system isn't hard. Really.

First, please see http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=193371&cid=158 64227 [slashdot.org]a prior Slashdot comment for my detailed writeup of what a totally state-of-the-art MythTV high-definition system is capable of. I've had this system up and running since early January 2006, and its power and features still so far exceed any available commercial application it's not funny.

The funny thing is that I heard so many stories about how MythTV is the ne plus ultra of difficult installations that I actually put off getting started for some time after assembling the necessary parts. Some common MythTV installation mistakes:

MISTAKE: Not trying to build one because everyone knows MythTV installation makes grown men weep.
SOLUTION: It might do so . . . For those who've never installed Linux before. Yes, having some experience with Linux, or the willingness to learn along the way with learning MythTV internals, is essential.

MISTAKE: Not trying to build one because MythTV only runs on custom-built, homemade systems and I don't know how to build one.
SOLUTION: I'm two thumbs when it comes to hardware; even my earlier 2.8TB RAID 5 array [google.com] (which I'm not using for MythTV storage, but will at some point) was more a software project than a hardware one. For MythTV, as I mention in my message above, I simply bought a stock 3.0GHz Pentium 4 Sony Vaio system. It did have the advantages of a) being pretty darn quiet and b) being black with flip-down covers covering the drive bay (a family member who visited recently didn't even recognize the case as belonging to a PC until I pointed it out), but these were simply superficial bonuses. There's no need to have to handcraft a SFF system in a "media PC" case unless one really wants to.

MISTAKE: Trying to build a high-definition system on the cheap.
SOLUTION: Anyone who does not feel confident about his technical skills and doesn't need high defintion ought to buy a TiVo. Seriously. Don't think that a MythTV system will somehow save you money, because it probably won't and probably won't look as nice sitting under the TV set. For those who moan and groan about the monthly TiVo fee [slashdot.org], I'll bet they're also the ones who moan and groan [slashdot.org] about paying $15 a month for World of Warcraft despite it being a far, far, far better value per dollar than any movie, DVD, or other videogame purchase. Get out of living in mom's basement, loser!

That said, anyone who wants to build a high definition-capable system needs to look at MythTV hard because, as mentioned, it can do things no commercial system can do. However, high definition takes horsepower. Lots of horsepower. The mythtv-users list sees a constant influx of new people who think that they can get away with assembling a HD-capable system with the spare parts sitting in their closets. They fail, then go away whining about how "MythTV is hard."

Here's what one needs:

* 3.0GHz Pentium 4 or better. Don't try to use a less-powerful system and then rely on XvMC [mythtv.org] to fill the gap.
* Nvidia FX 5200 or better. No, don't try ATI. No, don't try a MX400.
* Lots of storage space. Each high-definition recording stream takes 5-8GB per hour [slashdot.org]. I can record three such at once. Do the math.
* A standalone PC. The best way, by far, to install MythTV is to follow Jarod Wilson's justly-famous installation guide [wilsonet.com], which uses Fedora Core. Don't try to press in a system already being used for something else to the task (at least not as a frontend); it's not worth the hassle.

BOTTOM LINE: Anyone with some prior Linux i

Media Center Part of Vista

It should be noted that Media Center will now be part of certain versions of Vista.

I've been testing it out the last few weeks and it is really quite slick. I can even assemble a "playlist" of MP3s, WMVs, GIFs/JPGs, and just about any other media on the computer and have it burn it all straight to a DVD. Not only that, but the DVD has a very professional menu-driven interface that worked perfectly on my 1995 Sony DVD player.

MythTV looks great when it's up and running, but with the majority of tuner/video cards having Vista support out-of-the-box, I really can't see Myth getting market share on Vista.

Strange comparison...

Why did they compare to Windows Media Center 2004 and not 2005 at least?
And in a month or two, the version after that will be released as part of Vista.

Hmmm...

Tried Myth, Gave up.

First, I've been using linux since 1994 in desktops and servers. I no longer use it as a desktop anywhere, but have several servers running various flavours.

I tried MythTV about 3 months ago. I had decided I wanted a media PC to play our fansubbed anime, silly viral videos, and huge mp3 library. I figured myth would be my best bet. I was wrong. First I tried a gentoo install so I could optimize for the hardware I had. Lengthy system install/compile later I couldn't emerge mythtv because of licenseing issues of some of the components. I found some forums giving alternate emerge sources and ways to get around it, but they didn't work.

Enter Knoppmyth, easy setup, it worked... sort of. After playing around with it for a day or two I found the interface almost useless to me. I have a large library of files, both mp3 and avi/mpg. Trying all the various configuration options browsing to find what I wanted to play was still a painful and slow process. The available mp3 playing options were even worse, it took forever to setup a playlist. I decided to just use the stand alone apps and forget the front end, use a file browser to get to what I want, but then realized... why bother? winamp or itunes blows the linux knockoff players away for mp3, and I can use vlc and mplayer on windows with a better interface.

So I installed windows. I hate windows. I don't use windows as a rule. It's quirky and buggy and a hog, but it still offers a better way for me to play my videos and mp3s in the livingroom. What's more, I can play WoW in there if I want now, or some small party type games (you don't know jack!)

I see the myth does offer superior recording and transcoding abilities, which is fantastic and maybe one day I'll setup a myth backend-only system. Right now it just doesn't do anything well for me. When you're dealing with an embedded or rather specific-task computer the user interface is very important. Myth doesn't have it. I'd go so far to say that even linux still doesn't have it. Probably if I had spent a week or two tinkering with it I could have had a really well setup system, maybe I would've had to write my own front end, but who has that kind of time?

I would have continued to use my xbox and xbox media center but it can only handle a very small percentage of HD files on that processor.

Windows Media Center sucks

I bought a PC with Windows Media Center. It was OK while it worked But after loading music onto it and using it as a TV for a couple of months, it started falling apart and became unusable: weird error messages, crashes, BSODs (and it wasn't the hardware). I gave up on it. I frankly don't think Windows Media Center is ready for the consumer.

Xbox front end?

I've been playing with modded xboxes for a few months now and I was wondering how difficult it would be to get a mythTv front end running on an xbox while having a dedicated machine in another room doing the actual recording. Anyone try this yet?

Not a surprise

How hard can it be to beat someone who's sold their souls to the recording industry?

Girly TV GUIs

Oh come on. All you need is 'at', the dvb tool set with 'szap' and you good to go. The kids these days ... I dunno.

    PenGun
  Do What Now ??? ... Standards and Practices !

My experience with PVR

OK,
some years ago I had received a TV tuner card and installed it on a Win2K box.
It pretty well worked as advertised, but the scheduling software was standard windows... you could only run it if no other programs were running.

I've had a DVR from my cable company, but with all the add-ins (Digital tier, remote charge, box charge) it proved to be too expensive, plus it needed frequent hard reboots.

Then... enter Miglia's TV Micro.
A little USB dongle (with an included USB cable) that decodes the signal and software that works perfectly on my Mac.
(The downside is that you need a beefy Mac to run it, or pretty much any new 2-core system, since the tiny thing has no hardware compressor, but from what I understand a reliable, worry free MythTV setup requires beefy hardware too.)
It also can export videos to iPod and synch them overnight. I can also stream them to my other computers on the home network via iTunes sharing.

Other than a 100 bucks USB dongle, there's no expense. I can even set shows to record from the web.
Now if only Apple would release an airport that can stream video, I'd be all set to watch my library directly on the TV.

What about Teletext Subtitles?

This question probably won't be relevant to US users, but is more directed to anyone in the UK, Europe, Australia, or NZ...

I tried out MythTV some time ago and tried to get it to record Teletext subtitles with the program, and failed miserably, mainly due to my lack of ability, more than anything else.

Can anyone tell me if MythTV now has built-in support for recording Teletext Subtitles?

MythTV=No premium HDTV content

As much as I love MythTV, it will never meet my needs because it cannot and will not be compatible with any premium HDTV content. If all I cared about was crappy local network HD, then it would be OK. But I am far more interested in Discovery HD Theatre, HDNet, ParamountHD, etc... the only way to get those (and others) is through satelite or digial cable... neither of which is going to work with MythTV. Soon, DirecTV will offer *hundreds* of HDTV channels.

So I am still "stuck" with an HD TiVo + DirecTV. It is sad, too.... I thought the whole point of cablecard was going to be to allow third party hardware and software to operate seamlessly on proprietary and protected video networks. But I don't see that happening.

Save your root partition

I just spent the last couple of days re-building my MythTV box after a drive failure (why, oh, why did I build my entire RAID out of Maxtor drives?). My RAID-5 corrupted the XFS filesystem (software bug). My last system was Debian/x86-based, and it ran pretty well for about 9 months. There were a few annoyances, mainly having to do with stability and a few hacked-together packages not quite working together (e.g., transcode). This time around, I went with Gentoo/x86_64, mainly so that video transcoding codecs will run faster. I have ivtv (PVR-250) and cx88 (HD3000) both working in a fully 64-bit environment. The system, so far, has been stable, and all of the parts are well-integrated and functional.

There is just one issue I need to work out at the moment; HDTV is consuming 100% CPU and skipping a lot on playback under MythTV. This was not happening under Debian/x86. I know I have XvMC working on the box; if I dump the mpeg video straight to disk from the capture card and then play back to XvMC under MPlayer, I get 20% CPU utilization, and the video plays back smoothly, so I'm going to have to do some investigation in to how to coax MythTV to use XvMC right.

Based on personal experience, I have a few bits of advice:
  - Don't rely on RAID-5 (software or hardware) to save your butt when a hard drive fails; keep regular backups if your media -- including a dump of your mythconverg database -- on external media (e.g., a 750GB USB disk).
  - Keep detailed notes about anything special you had to do to get your machine to work right. Print them out and tape them to the inside cover of your box. Keep copies of your configuration files (lirc, etc.) somewhere off the box.
  - Once you have everything in your root partition the way you want it, tarball the whole thing up and burn it a couple of times out to DVD-R's. My complete installation, with original package files and all, weighs in at under 4 gigs when gzipped. Should I need to restore the system back to a functional state, I can go through the first few steps of a Gentoo minimum install and then simply untar the root partition image.

Re:TV

You're saying this on slashdot? The ultimate waste of time ever invented. (well aside from fark and the other waste of time).

Re:Offtopic - shit site design

Take a look at the average newspaper or magazine

Re:Simple but functional

Beyond TV does a pretty good job, though it doesn't instantly jump to TV.

Re:TV

Fucking stupid.

Do you know why we own Tivos and why MythTV is useful? So we can go outside and do things and then watch TV on our downtime. But you missed the whole point there. Besides, I'm sure you NEVER relax and sit on your ass, right? And even if you did, I'd bet you sure wouldn't let yourself enjoy it.

Re:A rare instance when OSS is superior

not some ivory tower living geek power user.

I dont think it is that, I think it is that corporate developers
dont have a lot of choice in answering to the corporation. And
the corporation has a large set of inputs that are not customer
oriented.

Re:Simple but functional

Try dscaler.

http://deinterlace.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

Re:TV

"Go outside, breathe some fresh air, join a club or band, do something instead of vegging away your life."

Uh-huh. And you typed that message on your wrist-PC while skydiving and enjoying the great outdoors, right?

Re:A rare instance when OSS is superior

There is another reason why OSS can come up with better solutions, the projects are usually managed by experienced developers who understand what makes good code.

Most companies are stuck with management who cant code and hence dont understand what makes good code. These people then usually hire which ever dev kisses their arses the most in the interview.

Re:TV

"vegging away your life" is a behavioral problem not a technological one. Like other posters have suggested, the big motivator behind MythTV, Tivo, and similar DVR solutions is to help you fit TV into your schedule instead of building your schedule around the TV.

The fact that you take such an extreme position against media suggests you've got some unresolved mental issues. Maybe your parents beat you whenever you turned on the TV and the very thought of watching a TV makes you wince in pain. You need to learn about moderation [wikipedia.org]; an important concept for a healthy life.

The article is fluff as well

I think this was all architected to get page hits at Tom's. The article sucks, and the mouse-overs on the page popped up more than once _accidentally_ for me. I'm not "looking forward" to part two. Maybe Ars will do a proper article on MythTV someday.

Re:Simple but functional

ATI released there encoder and remote drivers for XP Media Center Edition. A quick trip to your favorite torrent site should get you a copy of MCE (Windows XP with a second disk with the Media Center Files on it). Actvation and WGA cracking is simple as pie and boom you got a media center. You can use your PC as a PC and when you feel like it use your ATI remote for media center. My Red ATI logo on my ATI remote now opens media center and all the buttons corrospond to media center. So far ive been MORE then impressed by Windows XP MCE. Lets say I set an app to record right ... well I forget and shut my computer off or it goes on standby ... it turns on and records the show. I was pretty amazed when I got awaken one night by my PC turning on and recording a show in the middle of the night. Media Center is completely multithreaded (ie a backend and a frontend etc etc). Although it can be a little resource intensive it's very nice including all the things that "MythTV" includes (weather and all that fun stuff). I managed to turn my system (a Athlon64 3800x2 with a ATI 9600XT AIW) into a media station overnight. I hardly watch TV but im very very impressed with the quality of media center and how it simply just works.

Sure you have to pay "licensing costs" and shit but I don't care about intelectual property ... the company goes outa busniess cause I choose to steal it ... meh ... not my problem someone else will make somthing. I honestly don't care ... but if you want to try somthing which simply works and you can convienently use as a media center solution Windows XP MCE is somthing to check out. Plus it comes with a pretty new theme.