I'm a cord-cutter & I'm worried about the impact this will have on my free TV reception.

My understanding is that these devices are supposed to phone home, and find an "unused" UHF TV channel, so that they don't interfere with local TV broadcasts. But what is the definition of "unused" ? Will I still be able to pick up TV stations from 60 miles away, or will they be drowned out by the neighbors wireless gadgets? How about low-power (college / community) stations?

And then there are hacked gadgets (like people do now to enable wifi channel 14) and broken gadgets to worry about.

Google bought a small company called SageTV a few months back. They were one of the only companies offering a "whole house" PVR solution via tiny thin-client media extenders running on multiple TVs, and PVR software running on PCs. They had an extensible UI, as well as a number of features (like local media file management) that cable company DVRs either don't do, or do very poorly.

My guess is that they intend to apply the SageTV team to making cable boxes suck less; especially whole house solutions. Obviously they won't be using clients PCs as the server any longer, but a lot of the technology is applicable.

First, the best quality is arguably 1080i (1920x1080 at 30fps), which is same resolution as 1080p once it is de-interlaced. 720p (1280x720 at 60fps) is better for motion, since it is not interlaced.

Second, the reason that nobody broadcasts 1080p is because there is not enough bandwidth in a single channel. To clarifly the current ATSC standards provide for 19Mb/s and require MPEG2 and limit the codecs they can use, which terrible compression. If broadcasters could use a modern codec (H.264, VP8, etc), then they could probably squeeze 1080p out of a single channel. But then you'd need to buy new digital tuners to get the h.264 encoded TV.

Third, broadcasters's greed is their own worst enemy when it comes to signal quality. In my area, many stations have as many as 2 SD sub channels (and our ABC has 2 HD channels, and one SD channel). Some are also carrying mobile DTV. These subchannels are usually re-runs of crappy old TV/Movies, music videos, shopping channels, and other junk like you'd see on basic cable. They limit the bandwidth for the main HD channel to 12Mb/s or less. I've recently put up a bigger antenna so I can pull in channels from a market 50 miles away, simply because the broadcasters there use less subchannels, and have far better quality.

It is a pig. Playing videos with this uses about 5x the CPU and 35 watts more power as playing the same video with VLC (measured via a Kill-A-Watt). Details:

Running Ubuntu 10.04 on my Athlon II X4 635 in a 780G motherboard with on-board Radeon HD3200 graphics (using the Radeon driver), playing a 480p clip from Hulu scaled to 1080p full screenuses 220% CPU (eg, over two full cores). If I download the same video from hulu with get_flash_videos, I can play it in VLC with 35% CPU utilization (eg, less than 1/2 of a core). The VLC playback is smooth (as well as add and logo free), while the flashplayer playback is dropping frames.

Note that I tried both huludesktop and a chrome browser window, and got the same (terrible) performance.

Sage & Myth will work together, but fairly poorly. I moved from MythTV to SageTV a few years ago. I had intended to export my recordings from MythTV and import them into SageTV, but I never got around to it. I just used the mythrename perl script to create meaningful filenames for the myth recordings (rather than 1021_2010010010.mpg style mythtv names), and re-recorded anything I really cared about the show descriptions / etc.

The really nice thing about the sagetv media extender is that all the normal plugins for sagetv (like commercial skipping) work on the extender. The new extender is a little bigger than a box of playing cards, and pulls 7W when playing back 1080p. People have velcro'ed them to the back of wall mounted TVs.

Drew

Yes, it is definitely about what works best for you. I've been using *nix for about 20 years (SunOS, Ultrix, OSF/1, FreeBSD, Linux). I "switched" to MacOSX in 2006. In my experience, using MacOSX as a desktop OS was horribly painful, and I gave the Mac to my inlaws, switched back to Linux on a whitebox about a year later.

The main problem I had was that there was no way to configure the native window manager to my liking. I've spent 20 years with *TWM and KDE variants configured so that:
1) focus follows mouse
2) Meta-mouse1 moves a window, Meta-mouse2 resizes a window, and Meta-mouse3 moves a window
I'm so tied to these bindings that I even submitted a patch to KDE about 10 years ago when I switched from CTWM they would work with KDE (I also submitted a patch to Gnome, but they ignored me..)

Since I couldn't configure the native Aqua interface / window manager to do what I wanted, I ended up using CTWM and X for most of my work (xterms and emacs windows). The big problem I had was that when I wanted to switch from a native MacOSX app (like Mail) into an xterm, I'd forget to click on the xterm, and end up doing odd things because the Thunderbird mail window would still have focus. If I had a dollar for every email I accidentally deleted or replied to while typing in an xterm while Thunderbird still had focus, I'd be rich. I just could not train myself to work with a click to focus system.

I will say that lots of stuff that is a PITA in *nix worked quite well (suspend/resume, flash video, multimedia stuff, printing). But for me, not being able to customize the user experience to my liking forced me back to *nix. If I need commercial apps that don't run under linux, there is always a Windows VM..

I thought that Hulu upped their encryption, and broke rtmpdump in January. Is there some way to use Hulu via rtmpdump and MediaTomb these days? I'm using PlayOn, and ever since the encryption change in January, the streams are horrible quality because Playon is now rendering them via flash, and re-encoding the rendered video, rather than just transcoding the video.

I'm in the process of trying out Chrome, and was looking for adblockers. Right now, I'm using adthwart (http://qux.us/adthwart/). It uses EasyList, just like AdBlockPlus on firefox. So far, it seems to work nearly as well as AdBlockPlus, but is not as configurable.

I maintain a 10GbE network driver for an IHV. We have one guy (me) doing our 10GbE drivers for all non-Windows OSes. Our driver is GPL has been in the Linux kernel (minus a many helpful features) for quite a while, and is also in other open source OSs (FreeBSD, OpenSolaris). However, we also have to offer a driver directly from our site with all the latest features and bugfixes, since distros are so slow to pick up changes. In this driver, I abstract Linux kernel API changes away, so that the same driver compiles on 2.4.0, 2.6.32rc and all versions in between. The Linux kernel API churn is responsible for over 20% of the size of this generic Linux driver, and is a frequent source of problems when vendors like Red Hat backport new features (like GRO) from the mainline kernel in incompatible ways. OSes with stable kernel APIs are so much easier to deal with that it isn't even funny.