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OTA DVRs? Nah, can't find those anywhere.

Front-end is Kodi on OpenElec running on a CuBox-i. Back-ends are several VMs. One VM is running a MythTV Back-end server recording from a roof antenna connected to a couple of HDHomeRun boxes saving to a mounted NFS QNAP 12 TB array. Other VMs run Sonarr, Sabnzbd and Sickbeard. Sorarr is also using a Transmission back-end, while Sabnzbd is using a Usenet subscription. Occasionally I also use Netflix and Vudu on a Roku stick which I turn on only when I need it. I white list every device and every port individually, and all things that could be considered borderline legal go through a permanent VPN link on my pfSense VM. Rock solid setup.

Prime Video suffers terribly from a very poor selection of titles outside of USA.

The selection INSIDE the US sucks pretty badly too.

I find that Prime Video, has much less than Netflix, and any newer or popular movies, the few that are on Prime, are also on Netflix.

I have Prime due to the shipping benefits and the occasional free ebook rental....and I have Prime all my viewing computers, tablets, phones and TVs....but I rarely watch the Prime option.

That being said, Prime IS one of the pieces I'm looking at for cutting the cord.

I don't have a good OTA external antenna yet, so my first step will be cutting Uverse back to only HD basic...local channels (with DVR on it too). That will be about $30/mo.

I'm then looking to maybe try the Slingtv service, to get the cable channels I'd miss...CNN and Fox news channels (try to get left and right sides, I'll miss MSNBC for the far left slant if I cut the cord tho)....the Slingtv streaming service indeed looks interesting. You have options to get most of the ESPN channels for an extra $5 a month...which I only watch during College Football Season. Anyway, for the most part Slingtv will be only $20-$25mo. Going to this route will save me about $55 a month from my Uverse U200 package I currently have.

Anyway...I already have Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube, and maybe soon SlingTV that I can watch on main TVs and other devices.....soon, I look to maybe get a good OTA external antenna and cut even the Uverse Basics package...but I gotta either look to a commercial DVR solution, like Channel Master or maybe look into MythTV again, which I dabbled in awhile back that worked VERY well with OTA stuff.

But, back on topic. I have stuff on YouTube, I might try it on the new Prime system too and see which makes more $$.

Mine is free though I do have to do various sorts of maintenance on it. It's nice to be able to go in with SQL queries to see what is in those 4.5TB or so of OTA ATSC rips, fix bad descriptions that came from the guide information, and fill in episode information for the stuff I want to keep around. (FYI it takes around 6GB/hour for full HD but more like 1GB/hour for an SD sub-channel.)

Although I don't do it on my current HTPC, if I got one of these I'd be interested in removing commercials and/or transcoding to MPEG4 (or Theora, etc.). I would hope and expect that something so embarrassingly-parallel yet not implemented in hardware would be faster on one of these AMDs.

mythtv

Windows cant power the laptop up.

Technically, no. But Windows (or Linux) can program a wake-up alarm into the RTC chip. See for example http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/ACPI_Wakeup .

It's a crapshoot depending on the CCI settings of your cable provider, but yes, they do. I have the quad tuner from Ceton, and from Verizon FIOS I get locals, expanded basic, and some of the premium channels with my mythtv backend. I recently rebuilt the box; it's currently running on Ubuntu raring, with an AMD A10 and 5x3TB in a ZFS array.

There's a small database that might be helpful:
http://www.ronfrazier.net/mythtv/cci/index.php
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/CableCARD

You'll also need a listings provider; I use Schedules Direct, which just works but does charge.

-R C
(Under linux, you'll only receive channels with no flags or the Copy Freely flag. In the absence of CCI flags, the Ceton tuner will also respect the old school analog (macrovision?) flags that are ignored by clear qam tuners.)

You would need to dive into CableCard nonsense. See the CableCard wiki page for more info.

In a nutshell.

The larger picture is, the programmers often ACTIVELY reject offers of critical help on interface design and usability, not to mention requests to streamline the installation of basic hardware such as remote controls. For instance, the Mythbuntu page for using ATi Remote Wonder remotes, which were immensely popular and are still readily available in retail packaged alone or with ATi's capture boards including the All-In-Wonder HD line. Setup for these things is a nightmare - command line garbage, edit this or that file, go see "this other page" to find out how to get all the buttons working.

Would it REALLY be hard to set up a script that could enable the necessary settings? Of course not, they've done it for a number of the other remotes by outfites like Hauppauge. But because scripting that isn't "sexy" and some of the programmers are still acting all butthurt about ATi not having open drivers before AMD bought them out, none of the MythTV or Mythbuntu team want to get off their ass and integrate such a script into the main trunk even if someone from the outside submitted it.

It's shit like this that hinders F/OSS adoption by the larger population.

I've been using MythTV for a couple of years on Mac Mini (running OSX rather than Linux), talking to an HDHomeRun network tuner connected to a broadcast antenna in my attic. The team has really improved the OSX port in the last few years, with the only lack of Linux parity being in the realm of hardware-accelerated playback.

After dealing with the confusing setup screens and active channel scans, it has worked brilliantly, especially since the 0.24 release. The scheduling software is really good, especially using the web frontend. Watching TV on any computer in the house has been very convenient, and the automatic commercial skipping is pleasant.

Between broadcast and online sources, I get most of what I want to watch, the exceptions being Game of Thrones and some cable-only basketball and hockey broadcasts. The complete, uncompressed HD signals over broadcast TV are perceptibly clearer than HD cable (or, worse, HD satellite) signals, which suffer from the compression.

O.K. is there a problem with MythTV ?
I keep promising myself a system based on MythTV.
http://www.mythtv.org/detail/mythtv

2. That bothers me also but broadcast television really sucks. Being tied to a schedule not of my making is a horrible waste of human resources.

Ain't that the truth. Wouldn't it be great if, say, a computer could record it for you and then you could watch it later?

What platform are you running that doesn't handle the DRM? I'm on the Finance side of things, so I'm not too knowledgeable about the technical aspects, and I'd be interested in learning more about how your setup is impacted.

I used to use the streaming thing from two machines. My HP TouchPad, which has Flash, and so could stream with the old system. I also have a FreeBSD machine connected to my projector and surround sound system. This could also use Flash (although it was a little bit more effort), and so worked with the old system. Neither of these platforms works with Silverlight.

One of the advantages of a DRM-free implementation built on top of standards is that LoveFilm (or whoever) doesn't have to worry about supporting nonstandard clients - if there is any interest, then users can support it themselves. Another example is MythTV - a few people I know use Myth boxes connected to TVs or projectors for their movie watching, and Silverlight means that they can't use LoveFilm (or Netflix) with their setups either unless they do something like install Windows in a VM (seriously, that's the recommended way of making it work).

Of course, people using these operating systems are minority overall, but they tend to be right in the middle of the early adopter demographic.

Well... you do know MythTV can run in Windows now right? I'm betting with a little work NetFlix could indeed be up and running....

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/MythTV_on_Windows

Mythtv currently does not use (and as far as I know, never has used) volume as a consideration in its commercial detection. You can read about it here:
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Commercial_Detection

I'm curious if "something like this" would have enough horsepower to be a mythtv frontend. My gut level guess is, "probably yeah". I love my mythtv system...

Well the mythtv wiki seems to think that the Intel HD 2000 and 3000 on the new Core iSeries is sufficient for it. That is without VAAPI support which is scheduled right now for 0.25.

I would welcome if the EPA implemented and slowly phased in the ENERGY STAR program for all electronics sold with their very nice Watt-Hours (US) yellow stickers since this would start to bring the issue of power efficiency in appliances forward and allow the general populous see the actual numbers behind their products.

Solution 1 - Cancel your Cable or Satellite

I cancelled my DirecTV satellite subscription a few years back and don't miss it yet still get all my TV entertainment from the Internet and the Web without having to fork over $100+ to the cable company to subsidize their QVC shopping channel and the other 299-channels that I will never tune to or ever watch. My television viewing habits are now focused only on the very few shows that I do watch and my enjoyment of television has increased as I no longer waste any time on the increasingly annoying and idiotic product advertisements.

Solution 2 - Build your own Digital Video Recorder computer

HTPC - iAtom 1.8 2C, 2GB DDR3, 40GB SSD, 2TB HDD, Blu-Ray, ATSC+ClearQAM, Mini-ATX, 120mm Fan - Subtotal: $586.91

XBMC - Media Center Front-End with (Multi-OS Windows, Linux, Apple, etc.) - Does Not Support Recording or Capture, Playback Only
MythTV - Digital Video Recorder (Linux) - Does Support Capture and Recording

I build my own HTPC using Intel Atom and nVidia Ion 2 running XBMC front-end on Ubuntu Linux with a 40 GB SSD, 1.5 TB HDD, 2 GB RAM, and AverMedia Digital Capture card for Over The Air TV (that I never setup with MythTV and don't watch anyway). This little box has HDMI direct connection to my 50-inch TV so I get full video output and also fully accelerated MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 (ASP, and AVC H.264) decoding at 1080p without dropping any frames thanks to nVidia Ion 2 (aka Ion Next Generation) all on the low-power 1.8 GHz dual-core Intel Atom processors while only utilizing 5-7% CPU when doing playback. It is also dead quiet due to the SSD, WD Green HDD, quiet liquid 120mm ball-bearing fan, and fan-less motherboard cooling.

The whole box uses 45 Watts while idle, 50 Watts while watching a show, and 55 Watts when I do a full load test on all the components at once. I leave this box on permanently and it serves as my server for SSH, FTP, DDNS, Wake-On-LAN, BitTorrent, etc. It is a lot more energy friendly than any other desktop or server I ran previously in my house for same Linux server duties and I can use it to watch TV while it does all those other things in the background.

Solution 3 - Do Not Use Your Desktop as Media Box

For heavy processing or encoding, I use the desktop computer but keep it on only while I'm sitting down at it and that beast with the two monitors eats 465 Watts of power idle and will hit ~550 Watts if I hit the video card hard. That's a 10-fold increase in power utilization so I always turn my desktop off when I'm done with it and boot it back up in just a few seconds thanks to the new Intel 320 160GB SSD (upgraded from Intel 80GB G1 SSD). The two 3-second pauses during boot-up to go into the Silicon Image and Intel RAID menus take longer than load Windows 7 entirely otherwise my computer would be up in under 10-seconds.

ATI, Nvidia, and Intel provide open source drivers for Linux. However, they all don't provide the same amount of support. For example, Intel and ATI support for VAAPI is not as strong as NVidia.

TiVo's senior director of IT, Richard Rothschild, for instance, explained how those set-top boxes track everything you watch for advertising and marketing and then combine the information with supermarket membership card data to determine how effective ad campaigns are.

Fuck that shit, I've been running MythTV for probably 7 years now and it is (and always has been) far superior to any of that bullshit Tivo has ever delivered.

When it was reported by Tivo that Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" was the most replayed moment ever in Tivo history, I just laughed my ass off, as what I had always suspected had just been confirmed... they're watching everything you do.

I wouldn't pause too long on that teeny bopper in a swimsuit if I were you, as it just might get your ass v&.

I was going to say this, but you already have, so I'll just expand on it.

XBMC is great for organizing media. It has some neat features:
-looks really nice, suitable for a living/theater room, not geeky
-movies, pictures, sound
-IMDB integration
-scripts (do anything)
-contributed lists of Internet TV stations
-support for IR remote controls and universal remotes
-remote playback (playing computer being separate from the storage computer)

http://xbmc.org/

One thing it's not really designed for is to record TV. For that, use MythTV.

XFS, but of course research the pros and cons and see if it's for you

good overview:

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/XFS_Filesystem

Yeah, it's called MythTV

http://www.mythtv.org/

I was a bit worried that this might impact MythTV's commercial detection capabilities, but according to this page, it would appear that volumne levels are not part of the determination.

Any MythTV devs reading this know for sure?

I don't know about Tivo specifically, but MythTV has a couple of methods that, AFAIK, don't have anything to do with volume.

From http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Commercial_Detection

# Blank Frame Detection - Is used to determine when a programme fades to black (this invariably happens between show segments)
# Blank Frame & scene change detection - As above but tries to determine that a large amount of the picture has changed
# Scene change detection - Tries to determine that a large amount of the picture has changed
# Logo detection - Looks for a part of the picture that does not change during a recorded show - i.e. an onscreen logo. Logos are usually removed for the duration of commercial breaks, making them 'easier' to spot.

I tried out the WD TV Live and was impressed by it. I was streaming recorded content from MythTV using UPnP/DLNA and tried a number of other media files over USB and it was able to play them quite nicely. I played a bit of content recorded from a HD-PVR (in 720p) and it played back nicely.

Based on size, features, and price it is a worthy consideration. One of my co-workers owns 2 WD TV Live and at least 1 of the original WD TV. He has been very happy with them. Currently at least one of his WD TV Live is running the b-rad firmware.

I built a HTPC, along with some friends, several years ago to run MythTV. I have been very pleased with the result. It took a while to decide on the hardware. I have a system that sits with the TV. It is reasonably quiet., basically I only hear it a little when all sound is off and even then mostly when I walk closer. I looked for cases with Silicon mounts for HDs and 120mm fans (1/2 speed switch). I've got a passively cooled video card. We picked the Antec Fusion and I have been really pleased with it. There is also the NSK2480 without VFD and the MicroFusion now. One friend even built a second machine using basically the NSK2480 since he like the Fusion case design so much.

That said, I have been looking for a nice compact low cost front end that I can use if I get a second TV. Ideally I would like to run mythfrontend since it provides complete support with mythbackend (LiveTV, Commercial flags, etc). The devices I have primarily considered over the years are the HD TV Live, popcorn hour, Apple TV/Mac Mini (only if I can install Linux and run Mythfrontend), or a itx computer.

Based on how content is being accessed is the primary consideration along with required features. Aside from the LiveTV and commercial flag limitations with MythTV, I am currently most interested in the WD TV Live based on my criteria - small, networked, HD, significant codec support (MPEG2, DivX, Xvid, h.264, ogg, ac-3, etc), cheap. I had been looking for a device for several years and I became excited when the the WD TV Live came out. It is the closest device to what I'm looking for. I figure I can even just make LiveTV on MythTV accessible over UPnP with a little effort.

I'd like to see one with MythTV built into it. Plug it into the wall, give it a coax cable in, HDMI and USB out for monitor and keyboard, and off you go. Take your DVR anywhere.

Sure, the technology isn't quite there to do that cheaply, but it certainly wouldn't be expensive currently to build one that just connects to a wireless network and outputs Hulu.

Here. Next question?

Thats great until you want users, who use the services hosted on the sleeping machine, to be able to use those services.

Yeah, its great that an admin can wake a machine. Big deal. Been doing that for years...

Then surely it must have occurred to you that the service that those users want to use could be made smart enough to send a WOL packet to the sleeping machine, wait a few seconds and then try again. MythTV has been doing this for years.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but you need at least an 8xxx-series card for VDPAU (actually it seems Go 7700 will do as well). At any rate, 6100 is not going to cut it. Dunno about CUDA.

Does it allow me find&copy the recorded files to another machine so I can watch them on the road? (searching trough the hashed filenames is no fun)

MythLink will create friendly named symlinks for the recordings. You can also use MythRename (though it looks like that was killed)
Run it as part of a record job, or whenever you want to copy files.

Personally, I wrote my own perl script which runs after mythcommflag to rename the recording and run mythtranscode to drop commercials.
That way, I can view the recordings from my Windows boxen without having to skip the commercials (or use the not-so-good MythTV player).

You can use the built-in stuff, but it wasn't reliable enough for me. (OTA recordings can have corruption which cause mythtranscode to hang and/or write out multi-gigabyte log files)

Does it allow me find&copy the recorded files to another machine so I can watch them on the road? (searching trough the hashed filenames is no fun)

MythLink will create friendly named symlinks for the recordings. You can also use MythRename (though it looks like that was killed)
Run it as part of a record job, or whenever you want to copy files.

Personally, I wrote my own perl script which runs after mythcommflag to rename the recording and run mythtranscode to drop commercials.
That way, I can view the recordings from my Windows boxen without having to skip the commercials (or use the not-so-good MythTV player).

You can use the built-in stuff, but it wasn't reliable enough for me. (OTA recordings can have corruption which cause mythtranscode to hang and/or write out multi-gigabyte log files)

Does it allow me find&copy the recorded files to another machine so I can watch them on the road? (searching trough the hashed filenames is no fun) .

There is a perl script shipped with myth that renames files to a human readable form and updates the myth database with the new name. I use mythrename.pl, but it has been deprecated because its default options are supposedly dangerous in favor of Mythlink.pl which I haven't used.

More balance :)

I've also been using it since late 2003 and whilst the setup has improved, it's still an utter pain in the arse to setup and configure. Whenever the channel setup changes, I have to manually edit my xmltv entries for the various new channels (using the EPG only provides a week of entries, as opposed to 2 weeks for RT, plus keeps mythbackend running at 30% CPU and occasionally crashing). Keeping the database and filesystem in one piece whenever you rebuild a machine or switch to another distro is needlessly manual - why can't myth have a "save my database" and "look in this directory for recordings" import , rather than me having to edit my 450MB MySQL database?

MySQL was also a bad choice - I've lost count of the time it's become corrupted, and alot of users will have also run into the problems with Myth's retarded character encoding especially during the 0.22 upgrade http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Fixing_Corrupt_Database_Encoding Why can it not use .conf files for local/client-side configuration? Why not an SQLite DB a la XBMC which, on my machines, is far, far faster than MySQL for getting crap on the screen? Postgres or DB-agnostic SQL classes would have been better in every way (and would have saved me untold hours fixing MySQL tables), but they're another topic that generates "MySQL is the best!" and endless "wontfix" flames.

Sure, Myth is pretty powerful and I've done some really cool things with it. But the overhead of setting it up and keeping it running is high, much higher than I think it warrants, and its fragility hurts the WAF. Alot of it has improved, but it's still very much a project with the mentality of an experiment rather than a serious stab at the PVR market. Lots of easily automated/GUIfied tasks left as terminal-only solutions, and not very scalable in places (try loading a collection of ~1600 movies with metadata and thumbnails and scrolling through them - XBMC can keep up with the keyboard, Myth can't). Speaking of metadata, when 0.22 came out I still couldn't find a way to get Myth to do auto-lookups of TV shows... other than using one of various metadata lookup scripts, which was when I made the switch to XBMC.

Very little spit and polish in very many key areas is one of the main reason geeks like myself get pissed off with Myth. No-one's arguing that it can do some really, really funky things, but I don't agree with your point that with great power comes great respo... complexity. Myth just has alot of needless complexity because no-one's dedicated the time to make things go smoothly.

Tactics like this are exactly why I prefer systems like MythTV for windows and EyeTV for Mac. Heck, I can much more easily expand my storage space and install commercial skipping scripts with those, so I'll just roll my own PVR.

For sources, you can get clear QAM service on most cable systems, including broadcast digital HDTV. And there's things like Boxee, Hulu, Miro and of course, bittorrent.

Firewire must be available, but it does not mean that the content is accessible.

Many providers choose to use the 5C DRM scheme to block your ability to record via Firewire.

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Firewire_Cablebox_Compatability

Take a look at Myth's compatibility list for examples.

I'm about to expand it from all on one system..to breaking it into its client server components and have one big machine in my office out of the way with tons of drive space, and use it to feed smaller boxes by each tv/stereo in the house. I'm looking to maybe get the little Acer Revo for each front end box. It looks nice and small and quiet, and I think I'm reading if you use VDPAU on it...you can use it to view HD.

I don't have wireless keyboard/mouse yet, but will add those on...wired isn't bothering me right now since I'm running off a HD projector so projector, computer and controls are all near me on the couch so, no wires running around with this setup.

When I set up the front end boxes with flat panel tvs, I'll do wireless then. But that is what I watch tv through...and just alt-tab to do real computer stuff. If I'm in the middle of a live show, I hit pause, do computer...then back, but most of the time with a DVR, I RARELY watch live tv anymore...I just don't like fscking with the commercials.

The latest release of MythTV (.23RC1) contains a new plugin called MythNetVision which specifically enables browsing of online videos.

It's still a little rough yet, but is under active development.

The latest release of MythTV (.23RC1) contains a new plugin called MythNetVision which specifically enables browsing of online videos.

It's still a little rough yet, but is under active development.

Pinch more pennies and ditch TiVo for MythTV:

http://www.mythtv.org/

If you're a geek and don't know about it, check it! We need more devices with MythTV preloaded on them.

After several years of MythTV, the final straw was the removal of device support for my PVR-350. My time is simply worth more than the 20+ hours I probably spent over the years upgrading my MythTV box, hand-building device drivers, and dealing with other issues such as loss of audio.

If you value your time, I would suggest MythTV is not for you. I finally retired the box and got a 3-tuner DVR. Proprietary? Yes. (Actually, Linux under the cover, but good luck hacking it.) But it works consistently.

Pinch more pennies and ditch TiVo for MythTV:

http://www.mythtv.org/

If you're a geek and don't know about it, check it! We need more devices with MythTV preloaded on them.

As I'm certain you've seen elsewhere, MythTV should meet your needs.

Really, where can I buy one off the shelf ready to go?
Actually, I am considering building a MythTV box. I just haven't gotten around to it.

As I'm certain you've seen elsewhere, MythTV should meet your needs.

FYI, I'm using a plain HP dual-core desktop with the stock Intel graphics chip as a frontend/backend.

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Compaq_DC7700_Small_Form_Factor

I can render and playback HD just fine.

I've been using a Pentium 4 3.0GHz-powered box as a MythTV frontend/backend for more than four years. It often records four high-definition over-the-air or FireWire MPEG-2 streams while playing back another.

For the first three years I used an Nvidia video card with Xv output to play the recordings at very good quality with 50-70% CPU usage. A year ago I moved to VDPAU, which gives me even better playback with under 5% CPU usage, and will do the same with h.264 recordings (generated by the Hauppauge HD-PVR, for example). Thanks to VDPAU, there's every possibility I'll be able to use the Pentium 4 box for another four years.

I've been using a Pentium 4 3.0GHz-powered box as a MythTV frontend/backend for more than four years. It often records four high-definition over-the-air or FireWire MPEG-2 streams while playing back another.

For the first three years I used an Nvidia video card with Xv output to play the recordings at very good quality with 50-70% CPU usage. A year ago I moved to VDPAU, which gives me even better playback with under 5% CPU usage, and will do the same with h.264 recordings (generated by the Hauppauge HD-PVR, for example). Thanks to VDPAU, there's every possibility I'll be able to use the Pentium 4 box for another four years.

Yes. MythTV. The answer to my original question is: possibly. http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Commflagging

They analyze changes in the video data stream, so theoretically it could trigger a false positive if the settings were too strict or too loose, given the scenario of a commercial being featured in a show as part of the show. It would also probably require going fullscreen during the commercial instead of showing a TV playing a commercial.

Time Warner has disabled that functionality in my cable boxes, according to both the diagnostic screen and the fact that the computer detects nothing when I connect it :(

I'm fairly sure that's in violation of FCC regulations. Have a look at this; it provides the ammo you'll want to bring to your cable company to get them to cough up a properly functioning cable box. (Assuming that they didn't put in for a waiver, as is alluded to at the end of the section...if that's the case, they should be able to produce a copy of that. If they do, though, you're still screwed.)

My experiences (plural) with Ubuntu, MythTV, and MythBuntu (which was supposed to "streamline" the whole process) were similar in trying to set up a DVR.

Consumer-level HDTV card (ATi HDTV Wonder, PCI). ATi video board. ATi Remote Wonder II for my remote control.

Every time a new version of Ubuntu/MythTV/Mythbuntu would come out, I'd try to load it up and get it to work correctly. Multiple people insisting it would work fine, others insisting "no support" for the stuff. Back and forth. Most of the problem stems from the fact that in every stinking version, something gets changed, then it takes them a year or more to document the crap.

In the Ubuntu Hardy Heron attempt, every bit of documentation was either Gutsy Gibbon or Feisty Fawn. No help there. Tried again at Jaunty Jackalope's release WITH Hardy Heron, and still 90% of the damn documentation hadn't been updated. I'm stuck chasing around tidbits and forum posts with "well here's how you do it, LINK" only to find out that the link is either (A) for a version I'm not running, (B) assumes information I don't have, or (C) no longer available.

Tracking down how to set up a remote control reliably with Lirc is a pain beyond torture as well. I spend 99% of my time on Windows (hey, I have better things to do with my time than fight a damn OS. Windows does what I need it to do and runs what I want to run.) This is the "tutorial" for setting my remote control up under MythTV. And let me tell you right now, this thing is a shambles.

Linux people don't write clear-cut instructions for anything. This is true and I agree, it is Linux Bug #1.

Integrate Boxee into MythTV and stream Netflix to it and you have a solution that does just about anything (short of Cable Cards) that anyone could want.