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While I may be a paranoid tinfoil hat wearing nut who doesn't want Tivo knowing what I watch and rewind, my reasoning is dictated more by the fact that I like to customize my box, add functionality, watch videos I download, and freely distribute content to every PC in my house.

The WAF (wife approval factor) is quite high, and it's definitely a hit with the kids. Add the fact that I've learned way more about Linux in the past year than I did over the past 6 years as a casual user and I consider the project a huge success.

• Wild feeds are unencrypted programming, often with fewer or no commercials, and sometimes air in advance of their regular timeslots.
• Regular listings are mostly encrypted and by subscription, but there's no shortage of programming here either.
• And I won't go into 4DTV since I don't know much about it.

The encryption providers moan every year about having to raise the rates due to the declining number of subscribers, but this is self-fulfilling on their part since they aren't promoting the technology. It works great and it should continue to do so for quite some time.

(Did you notice I said "every year"? This isn't like cable, where you pay for it every month. One payment a year does the trick.)

The wildfeeds are where I get my advance Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy information, as posted here. It surprises people, but this information is in the clear for anybody to receive...

I wish somebody knew how to build a Freevo for the BUD, though.

This is a nice (Swedish site) keyboard without the numeric part and has a trackball made for your right thumb. Mainly designed to hold in your hands. It's black and wireless and probably works like a charm on my freevo system. Pretty juicy pricetag, around $100.

Freevo was not a pain to set up. Far from it - it went really well. I was up and running about an hour after first install, and was fully tweaked out just a couple of hours after that.

What about Freevo?
I've found it to boast similar features, however it works great on lower hardware specs than MythTV.

It's using the ever-popular mplayer (pre-configured - so anyone lacking the intestinal fortitude to configure mplayer can get it going as a no-brainer!), with mencoder for capture.

Add to that the slideshow (for your digital camera images or pR0n collection), MAME support and so forth and it becomes a great option!


I setup one of those crappy "BookPC" machines with MythTV, however it struggled with high-res DivX;-) playback. Upgrading the CPU was not an option (i810 chipset), so I swapped to Freevo and it worked a treat.

Install FreeVo on a PC with a capture card and video out and you have the same thing without the copy protection.

People keep saying that we wont have IDE compatible computers 20 years down the track - but if you are backing up all your data onto IDE drives - then just keep a computer thats IDE compatible for 20 years too and you'll ALWAYS have a comptuer to play them with.

The big problem with that theory is that hard drives aren't really meant to be used as a back-up media. Everything I've heard is that they have reliability problems if stored for long periods of time. The advantage of a RAID is that you can easily check your media, and even if one disk fails, you have a real-time backup.

That's not to imply that the server needs to be on all the time, just as needed to access the data.

On the other hand, you could set the thing up as a Freevo or MythTV box, and you can throw away your TiVo at the same time as you throw away your video tapes. Everything would always be online, ready to access as needed, and new stuff could be added anytime.