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Oh yeah... it runs linux.

The PVR-150 has an IR blaster built-in. No idea if MythTV supports it or not. You'd probably have to deal with the nightmare that is LIRC to get it to work.

The PVR-150 MCE/OEM is similar to the PVR-150, but without the IR blaster or receiver, and no 3rd-party software. It also includes and FM tuner.

The PVR-250 has Coax and S-video inputs, and a 1/8" stereo plug for audio input. It also has a IR input for the remote control.

The PVR-250 MCE (OEM) edition has Coax and S-video inputs, and RCA jacks for audio input. No IR input, as it has no remote control. I don't think you can buy these direct from Hauppauge, they are OEM-only devices.

The PVR-350 is like the 250, but with an S-Video output, MPEG-2 decoder, and an FM tuner.

Hauppauge finally put up a page that compares all of their tuners in one spot.

The PVR-150 has an IR blaster built-in. No idea if MythTV supports it or not. You'd probably have to deal with the nightmare that is LIRC to get it to work.

The PVR-150 MCE/OEM is similar to the PVR-150, but without the IR blaster or receiver, and no 3rd-party software. It also includes and FM tuner.

The PVR-250 has Coax and S-video inputs, and a 1/8" stereo plug for audio input. It also has a IR input for the remote control.

The PVR-250 MCE (OEM) edition has Coax and S-video inputs, and RCA jacks for audio input. No IR input, as it has no remote control. I don't think you can buy these direct from Hauppauge, they are OEM-only devices.

The PVR-350 is like the 250, but with an S-Video output, MPEG-2 decoder, and an FM tuner.

Hauppauge finally put up a page that compares all of their tuners in one spot.

The PVR-150 has an IR blaster built-in. No idea if MythTV supports it or not. You'd probably have to deal with the nightmare that is LIRC to get it to work.

The PVR-150 MCE/OEM is similar to the PVR-150, but without the IR blaster or receiver, and no 3rd-party software. It also includes and FM tuner.

The PVR-250 has Coax and S-video inputs, and a 1/8" stereo plug for audio input. It also has a IR input for the remote control.

The PVR-250 MCE (OEM) edition has Coax and S-video inputs, and RCA jacks for audio input. No IR input, as it has no remote control. I don't think you can buy these direct from Hauppauge, they are OEM-only devices.

The PVR-350 is like the 250, but with an S-Video output, MPEG-2 decoder, and an FM tuner.

Hauppauge finally put up a page that compares all of their tuners in one spot.

The PVR-150 has an IR blaster built-in. No idea if MythTV supports it or not. You'd probably have to deal with the nightmare that is LIRC to get it to work.

The PVR-150 MCE/OEM is similar to the PVR-150, but without the IR blaster or receiver, and no 3rd-party software. It also includes and FM tuner.

The PVR-250 has Coax and S-video inputs, and a 1/8" stereo plug for audio input. It also has a IR input for the remote control.

The PVR-250 MCE (OEM) edition has Coax and S-video inputs, and RCA jacks for audio input. No IR input, as it has no remote control. I don't think you can buy these direct from Hauppauge, they are OEM-only devices.

The PVR-350 is like the 250, but with an S-Video output, MPEG-2 decoder, and an FM tuner.

Hauppauge finally put up a page that compares all of their tuners in one spot.

The PVR-150 has an IR blaster built-in. No idea if MythTV supports it or not. You'd probably have to deal with the nightmare that is LIRC to get it to work.

The PVR-150 MCE/OEM is similar to the PVR-150, but without the IR blaster or receiver, and no 3rd-party software. It also includes and FM tuner.

The PVR-250 has Coax and S-video inputs, and a 1/8" stereo plug for audio input. It also has a IR input for the remote control.

The PVR-250 MCE (OEM) edition has Coax and S-video inputs, and RCA jacks for audio input. No IR input, as it has no remote control. I don't think you can buy these direct from Hauppauge, they are OEM-only devices.

The PVR-350 is like the 250, but with an S-Video output, MPEG-2 decoder, and an FM tuner.

Hauppauge finally put up a page that compares all of their tuners in one spot.

well if you go with a wired network, a hauppauge mediamvp makes for a neat network based media "client"

people have bridged mediamvp's over a wifi networks, fwiw.

GBPVR integrates nicely with mediamvp and its own backend PVR/scheduling/htpc-esque functions and is free as in beer.

ymmv,

e.

Then I have a question for you, or anyone else that uses bitTorrent to grab HD TV shows.

Do you watch them on your monitor or do you have a way to get them to your TV?

If you watch them on your TV can you explain how you set it up? I've found plenty of ways of getting a stream from my PC to my standard TV input (http://www.hauppauge.com/html/mediamvp_datasheet. htm this is the simplest solution I've found so far) but have not yet found a way to get one to my high-def input.

God-damn WinTV PVR-250 MCE does a CSS to my own video recordings (even if it is from my own home videos). If I want to edit them, I have to use something like DVDx to convert them to a format that I like! So if the software detects DVDx, it will say it is in violation of whatever copyright even though I am using it for legit purposes! I wonder what they will say to that?

I have a PC that I decided to employ as an all-out entertainment hub:

Games: GameCube, X-box, & PS2 are connected to it via a VGA box. In addition to this I've got arcade and console emulators.

TV:Yesterday I bought a Hauppauge PVR-150 $99 - $20 MIR)at MicroCenter. I tried out SageTV which downloads my local cable company's TV guide and gives me PVR capabilities.

Music:I use iTunes to organize my music. I have some decent PC speakers, but if I want to listen to some music in the living room, I connect an RCA cable from the line-out jack on my laptop to my stereo system. I share the music wirelessly using iTunes on my PCs with my wireless router.

Of course my PC organizes photos and video files, e-books, etc. In short, my PC handles home media to my satisfaction, saves space, and allows me to modify it to my taste.

That pulls/plays content from it's local drives and from over the network. My buddy uses a MediaMVP to good effect for pulling mpeg2, mp3, photo's, etc content over a wired network to his TV.

That and some ball bearings, and prestone antifreeze...

e.

It's probably derived from the same IBM sourced reference design as the MVP (bolting on a DVB tuner is a doddle). If it's anything like the MVP, it'll even be running linux as well....

Hauppauge MediaMVP is less than 100 bucks at PCAlchemy

There's pleny of mediamvp hacking (including work on a mythtv client) and 3rd party client replacements out there like gbpvr (how to article on my site )

*Shrug*

e.

Why not just get this:

MediaMVP by Hauppauge

It goes for less than $100 and displays to your TV...comes with a remote, too.

you must like doing things the hard way.

It's probably faster to install OS X on this.

After all, at least it's got a PPC (with a whopping 75 MHz, too!). The fact that OS X is RAM bound and the thing comes with 16 megs soldered in should only be a minor quibble...

A problem with Hauppauge is product confusion. The model number PVR-250 is just a trick number. The real number is 975 or some 3-digit number beginning with 9, and the PVR-250 datasheet doesn't say anything about the real number. A 975 PVR-250 costs maybe $70, and a 980 PVR-250 costs perhaps $120, and there are other numbers, too, apparently.

One of the nastiest aspects of working in technical fields is bored marketing people who don't want to learn about their own products, and don't want to burden their small brains with any technical knowledge whatsoever. When I want to try a new product I spend sometimes an hour or more getting past that.

--
24 wars since WW2: Creating fear so rich people can profit.

I've been doing some experiments with Myth over the last few months, and hardware selection is probably the most interesting part. The problem of getting enough power into a machine to decode/encode DivX/Xvid and do it for Tivo/Kiss money.

The first problem that became apparent was that anything with enough power to encode and decode these Mpeg4 streams was going to make way too much noise, which in turn causes a low SAF (Spouse acceptance factor - "There's no way I'm having that in my lounge!"). Other things that affect the SAF include the shape and colour of the case. If it's a old hearing-aid beige e-machines mini tower - forget it...

Anyway, on the CPU power issue I deceided to make use of Myth's ability to split the functions over 2 boxes (the back end and the front end machines). That meant I could just use my twin Xeon Dell 6400 that sits in the attic to do all the hard stuff like transcoding MP4 to MP2, recording shows and so on whilst making a similar noise to a small jet aircraft... The other advantage of this is that you can then display any of your content in any room equipped with a screen, and a Myth front end - store once, use in many locations. That just leaves selection of some hardware for the front end devices.

I costed up standard PC devices, but ideally wanted a fanless (and possibly driveless) machine. I looked at Shuttle barebones systems, those little VIA all in one mobo+CPU things and lots more besides. I also looked at using an Xbox (cost about £110/$200) but the CPU is woefully underpowered for this task, and by the time you've upgraded the RAM, the HDD etc you may as well have bought that Shuttle barebones system.

Then I found this:-
http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_media mvp.html

These devices essentially stream MPeg2 (and some other stuff) from a Windows only server. The beta version of the software can transcode from MPeg4 to mpeg2 before streaming the content to the device across the network.

Now this is actually quite useful straight out of the box, but then, a quick google later, it became apparent that these MediaMVP devices run a Linux distro called "BusyBox" on an IBM PPC chip, and boot the image off of DHCP/TFTP!

Not only that, but there's already a load of work been done, and I downloaded all the bits necesary to make the cross compile environment, and tried out some of the modified BusyBOX installs that people had made. It works! With the additional of a telnet daemon, NFS client, these things become truly useful. You can now telnet to the box and play around to get things going, and then incorporate those chnages into the boot image.

So it wasn't long before I thought this would be ideal to run a Myth front end. Like most ideas that are this obvious - it's already been thought if and the best place to start is here:-
http://mythmvp.org/

Unfortunately for me, my test MVP got taken out by an electrical storm that caused a power surge, detroying that and several Linksys WET11's on my network... bummer.

Best of all though - these MVP's are £50 and have hardware Mpeg2 decoders! (~$100) and stream MPEG2 even over 802.11b wireless with no problems, so it won't cost me much to get back up and running again (and hey, I was planning on upgrading my Wifi to 802.11g anyway :P)

Big fat video/PVR server - thin and cheap clients that's the way to go. Of course all of this is just temporary: I mean why do I want to store the shows? Really, I want someone else to host the back end and charge me a subscription to watch and listen to any show/movie/music track that ever existed. But in the meantime, as an intermediary step, I'm looking to at least centralise the content locally.

Other useful links for this project:-

Missed a u, it's Hauppauge. One of the most popular cards is the PVR-250.

Missed a u, it's Hauppauge. One of the most popular cards is the PVR-250.

Nevermind, found it. http://www.hauppauge.com/.

I have an Hauppauge WinTV-GO. It's the cheapest of Hauppauge tuners but it works great for me under both Mandrake Linux and Windows 2000. The only thing is that I don't have a processor fast enough (500mhz Celeron) to record and encode on the fly so I have to save to uncompressed AVI. You have a better processor than me so you should be able to encode your shows on the fly and do PVR no problem with that low-budget card. Good luck!

A final tip: find a video editing software to cut the publicity in the programs you want to keep!

I have an Hauppauge WinTV-GO. It's the cheapest of Hauppauge tuners but it works great for me under both Mandrake Linux and Windows 2000. The only thing is that I don't have a processor fast enough (500mhz Celeron) to record and encode on the fly so I have to save to uncompressed AVI. You have a better processor than me so you should be able to encode your shows on the fly and do PVR no problem with that low-budget card. Good luck!

A final tip: find a video editing software to cut the publicity in the programs you want to keep!

for real flexibility:
tivo-alike software
mpeg2 encoding tuner
yeilding a highly customizable tivo-alike system and fully portable files. I liked my first one so much, im now putting together a third box

I'll play your game rogue...

There ARE easy to setup PC PVR options. I shlopped a PVR350 in a box paired with SageTV (review) and it was pretty simple.

The cost thing is a valid concern. There is potentially a larger initial cash outlay (but no subscription fees.)

With that said the DirectTV deals with Tivo (which are they still being offered? Didnt't DTV and tivo have a bitter divorce quite publiclly last month?) ARE a great value if you go the satellite route. Dual tuning, digital only stream, Tivo ease of use, low subscription...

But out of the box without modification (software or hardware) you can't get the content off your DTV tivo box, which is the point of this article.

Another compelling reason is if you are a paranoid schizo and don't trust TiVo (no matter WHAT their privacy statements say, and oh by the way they can change them at any time) about collecting info on your viewing habits... if you DIY you can have more control over what goes in and out of your DIY PVR (unless you tape MTV, I can't help the GIGO there)

Note: I own and love my tivo and don't wear a tinfoil hat, just thought I point it out as a potential reasoning.

Now if Dishnetwork and DirectTV would supply the needed daughter cards/access cards to digital satellite PCI PVR cards we wouldn't be able to argue about the "re-encoding digital content" issue. (you can use those cards in Europe with subscription satellite services, but not here, from what I understand)

*shrug* YMMV,

e.

- and the remote was pretty sexy (anyone wanna help me write a driver for Linux?)

Take a look at the LIRC 0.7.0 snapshots. The Microsoft remote has been in there for quite some time and works well. In fact, you can use the IR receiver that comes with it and quite a few compatible IR remotes.

I have MythTV set up with a PVR-250 and it's the best thing ever.

Hear hear! I have a Myth server running two Hauppauge PVR 250s and it is smooth. The guide is smart enough that I just select two shows to record and it handles the rest. The best part is that I have a Myth client running in the main TV room that is a stripped down Dell 4600c which I got refurbished for $360that fits perfectly into the entertainment center. All the advantages of the two tuners, but the quiet-ness of a small form factor PC. Awesome stuff AND two TVs can use the same recording repository!

"I've yet to find anything that I use that doesn't run on all three platforms just fine."

I have one: mythtv is one that won't run on windows and has only $-ware nosourceware limitedware versions for windos... Nothing can beat the coolness and feature richness of a set of mythbackends with multiple frontends and one or more mediamvp's with our own gpl software.

"There's no reason for *anyone* not to feel "spoiled" by the large amounts of free, high-quality, software available!"

hihi. Funny, but I'm afraid for many of us it's too late to feel spoiled: We already are spoiled and are taking it for granted. I guess soon it will feel neglected, get mad and leave us ;-))

I looked at all those options as well, and decided that with the way the market is going, there will be a more kick-arse version of anything I buy within 6 months. (I'm not just talking standard technology advances better, I'm talking everyone getting into the field better)

I know that you specified wireless, (which I considered, as I already have an 802.11g AP plugged into my network) but for now I have ended up getting a Hauppage MediaMVP and putting in a run of cat5 to it.

The MediaMVP is basically just a small remote-control driven, network-connected set-top box which plays content from a server on a win2000/xp machine. Linux drivers have been made though, and the built in mpeg decoder makes it a good combo for the standard Hauppage PVR cards.

On the positive side, the sound quality is good, and the price is hard to beat ($99 retail, can be found for less).

Unfortunately the interface is shit. Very basic mp3 browsing - can move through the directories and playlists on your shared computer and select songs/playlists/directories. Unfortunately, there is no real skipping while playing several songs - the default setup if you choose a song is to play that one song and then stop. You can choose to play all songs in a directory, (shuffled if you wish), but it deosn't let you skip songs - if you choose another song, it just plays that one. The "skip" button just moves to the next page on the directory listing - an even worse interface on this first generation device than on my other first generation devices from preceding years.

The gui should however get better with firmware releases - already the latest firmware lets you add streaming radio stations (although not realaudio) and play divx files (although these have to be transcoded by your server). The MVP internals run on linux as well, so there are good possibility of future improvements.

As I said - there's quite a few similar devices coming out at the moment (eg this buffalo one ), and in six or seven months there will undoubtedly be something much better - but if I really want one of those I can buy it then, and I consider $99 a good price for 6-7 months of music.

The WinTV PCI Radio (or PCI FM) is the same card with an FM radio tuner as well -- the radio also works just fine under Linux.

There are a few other bt848 and bt878 cards out there as well. While they're a little old, they've got one especially cool feature many other cards don't: card-to-card bus mastering. With most modern video cards, you can have the cards talk to each other directly and the TV card uses zero CPU cycles -- just a smidge of bus contention when you're banging on video.

That said, the card can be a bit of a bitch with Windows XP. Hauppauge's driver engineers haven't kept the drivers very well up to date.

For the high-end of tv tuners, the Hauppauge WinTV PVR-350 is the champion. Linkie

I once bought a Hauppauge WinTV Theather model 498.

It never worked, first no sound due to a buggy driver.
A few weeks later the thing just gave op on me and gave me noise-only.
Also, the FM radio never worked. Maybe i had bad luck, but i'll never buy a hauppage just to be sure.

http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/prod_digital.html

Hauppauge MediaMVP stream the content from your existing PC to your TV for like 88beans street price... *shrug* it's not for everyone, but my buddy has it and I was surprised at how how well his quasi-pvr/home media center worked.

I'd rather build my own mini-itx htpc of course though =)

e.

PS I also believe there's quite the mediamvp hacking community (it doesn't support linux out of the box, from what I understand)

The trouble comes in that it is practically impossible to have one machine do lots of things well. It may do them all, but not as well as a machine designed just to do that single function would.

Examples: an actual TiVo is vastly superior to a PC w/ video capture and PVR software (with the notable exception that you can't burn shows to DVD... I'm talking strictly UI and stability). A DVD player may be great for watching movies, but the built in MP3 playback is usually pretty crappy.

I used to be an all-in-one kinda guy too... now I am starting to move towards a single machine for a single use philosophy. My TiVo is great, I am going to get a Gamecube soon, and just forget about dual booting XP so I can stick to Linux for all my desktop needs, etc.

Just my $.02.

According to Hauppaugue's site they have an HDTV card.
Is there some reason it wont work with Sage TV? I have never used Sage.

Since I have built my own DVR (four tuners, hardware decoder, using this software, I would really like to be able to upgrade to HDTV tuner cards and keep my DVR.

Are you listening Hauppauge?

Maybe there's a "watchdog" on the Myth system that reboots the system if Myth dies. The user won't want to wait for the system to reboot every time that they fast forward too quickly (happens on mine) or 'activate' some other bug.

Take the MediaMVP by Hauppauge. It's a Linux-based device designed for use by the "average user". How do they keep it up to date? Well, very little OS or software is on the unit itself. It netboots off a server you run on one of your PCs. The server (Windows app) checks for updates from Hauppauge's site, and when it gets one, it just loads it to the MediaMVP the next time it boots.

Obviously, you wouldn't want to require every user to have a LAN connection to an always-on home computer for net booting (or would you?). Besides, the whole Linux/Myth suite (remember, we need X too) would be a pretty hefty network transfer. With a "closed" device like this one, it'll be hard for users to install bugfixes, patch security holes, etc. etc. without being experienced in Linux (think power user instead of grandma).
I think the Home Media Center/re is going to need some sort of update method for both Myth and Linux. One little annoying bug would drive me crazy if there was nothing I could do about it.

well, it's not *quite* as thin... but if you have the money there certainly are sexy cases out there for mini-itx EPIA VIA motherboards... throw in a right angle pci riser and a hauppauge wintv PVR 350 and you should be dancing, right?

There are distro's of linux tailored to run on this platform too...

*Shrug*

e.

It would appear that the american digital TV standard is ATSC's 8VSB . But that may change to DVB-T anyway, which is the standard in Australia and the UK. As for encryption, that only comes into effect if you choose to get your digital from a cable or satellite company which requires the use of a smart card. There is no reason that a PC card can't descramble over the air broadcasts of digital TV. Look here for examples of US digital TV cards.

How you got rated +4 informative is beyond me.

It's amazing how the US still see's itself as the centre of the world and is still bent on adopting a different standard to everyone else when it comes to pretty much anything. Mobile phones, power systems, etc.
There is some perfectly good software being written in Australia but it just happens that it doesn't yet support digital TV either.

Showshifter seems to be the major one thats going with DVB at the moment, and once it supports my card, is probably the one I'll go with.

Why is this card better than something like Hauppauge's WinTV-HD? At least the Hauppauge has component outputs standard. I'm guessing it's the price as the Hauppauge isn't cheap. BTW, there's a few more HDTV cards available at places like The Digital Connection.

So why not just get a MediaMVP for $99 and call it done?

Hey look, my first post!

1) Time-shifting rented DVD's is nice (I don't always watch them right away).

2) Time-shifting TV is the ONLY way to go.

3) Music ripper/jukebox with fancy visuals is nice.

4) Mplayer compatible video player works out great for viewing new episodes of Red vs. Blue.

5) Web browsing.

6) DVD burning.

7) Expandable.

8) Upgradeable.

9) Skinnable.

There are certainly a couple of trade-offs, like those times you realize xmltv needs to be upgraded AFTER you've missed recording your favorite program. But if your a Slashdot geek these problems should be right up your alley. Anyone belly aching about the cost or convenience of a HTPC is probably not up for it. But for those of us who are, the additional features and flexibility will trump any store bought PVR any day (and if it doesn't, well just write the extra software!).

Note to potential HTPC do-it-yourself article writers: Use either Mandrake, Gentoo or Debian (if your new to Linux or don't like configuring things yourself: Mandrake). You'll save a lot of time because you can install all the neccisary packages to run MythTV from a single command (ie 'urpmi MythTV' if you've set up PLF or Thacs rpm archive). Its REALLY not that difficult, but if you don't enjoy this sort of project (challenge?) why waste your time. Btw, Hauppauge's WinTV-250 is the way to go (at least for the MythTV project).

here. I've been using MythTV under Mandrake for over a year now with none of the problems you described including commercial skip. With the combination of Zalman fan for the noise and WinTV-PVR-250 for the high quality hardware Mpeg 1/2 encoding you should be set. If your waiting, this is it. And you get a hell of a lot more functionality (and upgradability) for your buck. And if Linux gaming keeps picking up the way it has, you can kiss that Xbox goodbye too.

Instead of all that work, why not just get one of these. The only drawback with this device is the backend must run on a Win32 box...but the little device already runs Linux. Of course this is only good for mpeg1/2 streaming..but if thats all you would do with your Cube..why bother hacking it all up?

Funny, I found something like this today while looking for a new video card: Mauppauge MVP

It's $99, can play MP3, MPEG 1 + 2 and can plug into the TV. If they could just add battery power and an optical drive it would be perfect.

As a plus, it even runs Linux.

I use a Hauppauge WinTV-USB and am pretty happy with it. If it drops frames, I don't notice. It's not like I'm doing video editing with it (that's what my Firewire ports are for). The newer ones do audio over the USB cable so you don't even need to feed a line-in port on your soundcard. Though, again, the audio quality over USB is supposedly worse than the analog line-in port (which you can still use), but I can't tell the difference. What do you want? It's NTSC composite video with crappy analog sound. Watch a DVD if you really want to memorize Natalie Portman's every feature.

Hauppauge PVR/250/350 for Windows/Linux.
Elgato's EyeTv for Mac OS X.

Link to Hauppauge PVRs here.

Click me!

I have a lower range Hauppage product which I had trouble finding Linux drivers for (and Hauppauge were very uncooperative)... make sure your system will work with anything Hauppauge or make sure you have a very reliably backup option.

• MSI MATX I865PEM2-ILS
• Samsung black combo 52X24X52+16X CD-RW/DVD
• WAG311GE Netgear Wireless .11ABG+ PCI
• Intel P4 2,6GHz 800/512K
• Hauppauge WinTV PVR 350
• MSI GeForce FX5200 TD128 with DVI and TV-OUT
• 512MB PC400 DDRAM
• Maxtor Dmax Plus9 200Gb 7200RPM 8Mb SATA
• Coolermaster ATC 620C-BX1

The reasoning for the different items are as follows:

A similar model of the motherboard got good reviews by Toms Hardware Guide (yes, I know some people in /. hate Tom). The integrated sound on this board was recommended to me by an ALSA developer. It's also got SATA, LAN, USB and Firewire and, as a nice bonus, both coax and optical digital sound outputs.

Samsung...didn't matter much as long as it had DVD and CD-RW capabilities, black front was a nice touch though.

WAG311GE, one of few cards that support A, B and G wireless networking. Supported in Linux by the MadWifi drivers, unfortunately not truly open source, but neither are any other ABG card drivers.

Intel processor, I usually like Athlons but temperature (and thereby cooling requirements) is much more important in this box than speed.

Hauppage, well supported by MythTV and able to do MPEG2 recording and playback in hardware.

MSI GeForce, has VGA, DVI and TV-Out, also fanless and really cheap. Closed drivers but that's kinda hard to avoid.

Maxtor drive, I really wanted a more quiet Seagate but the SATA models were kind of impossible to find in any nearby store for decent prices. Also most stores seemed to have the ones with the least storage capacity.

Coolermaster, the case isn't "designed" to be a HTPC case (such as this one) which means it doesn't have the same silly price tag. It was also the exact same width as my stereo components (well, 3mm wider) and similar color.

Now all I have to do is wait...

I went through the build process of a DIY PVR. Eventually I stuck with MythTV after trying Freevo and some others, because of all the kick ass plugins for myth. The most useful piece of advice I have is pay attention to the hardware you're going to use first, and then add software.

The $45 ATI TV-Wonder you can get at best buy isn't going to cut it. This thing is ok for watching TV, but it's not even great at that. You definately want a TV tuner card with hardware MPEG2 encoding, preferably at 12MB/s. I'd recommend a Hauppauge product. You may even want to look into HDTV tuner cards, although I have no experience with them.

In the end the quality of your hardware is going to matter most, because regardless of the software you use to accomplish your goal, the end result will only be as good as the hardware that was used to capture the image.

I had a TiVo, but sold it after I built my own PVR. TiVo is great, and did some things my PVR doesn't (like suggested viewing), but all in all there's nothing better than your own home rolled PVR :)