TV all over again

So this morning I learned that one of my hard drives had died during the night. Luckily it was just holding backup data that was waiting to be burned to DVD-RW, so it was not a huge loss. But annoying nonetheless.

While I was in there replacing that, I figured I’d swap my TV card into that machine too, since the one that it was running in is failing to boot for reasons I don’t quite understand (it’s a combination of my fault and hardware bugs, I think). That required getting the card running under Linux.

It was only recently that my card (Hauppauge HVR-1600) got a Linux driver, so I was waiting for a while before I jumped over. But, given the confluence of annoying computer failures, I took the dive today.

It took several hours to hunt up code, compile kernel modules, install TV software, configure stuff, etc. Not really any longer than under Windows, so that’s good.

But now that I have it running, oh, man, am I glad I made the switch. MythTV is pretty awesome. The coolest thing for me is MythWeb, the web-based management plugin. Since I don’t do the using-the-remote watching-from-across-the-room thing, I really (really!) don’t like UIs designed for that mode. MythWeb instead gives a nice, compact, fast, easy to use way to browse listings, set up recordings, and get on with my life. Later I’ll just play my MPEGs out of a Samba share with VLC, totally avoiding the wacky UI stuff.

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