I’ve wanted to stay out of the MythTV promotion business in this thread, but since someone else brought it up…
I was a Tivo early adopter. I bought a Sony brand Tivo back in late 1999 or early 2000, and only just took it out of service at the beginning of this year. Even way back then it changed the way I watched TV. I’d even hacked it to put in a large hard drive, give me shell access, web server, upload and download video, and so on. But it was apparent that its proprietary nature and aging hardware wouldn’t continue to meet my needs.
So I built a MythTV box with off the shelf parts. HDTV tuner, couple of dual-tuner cards, RAID card, decent mobo and processor, nice large case, five freakin’ hard drives, gigabit Ethernet, some patience, and I was in business. It works flawlessly with the DirecTV receiver and can record several cable channels at once (although I don’t really have a need for such). It also works as a network attached storage server so all of our home folders live on the RAID’ed drive (yeah, gigabit Ethernet is quite fast enough). Because my iTunes and iPhoto folders live there, it’s a simple matter to stream them out to my televisions. I’ve (illegally-per-the-DMCA) copied my DVD’s to the thing. Archives and Archives of TV that I’ll probably never watch.
What’s even a cooler part of this is it’s a centralized system – it lives in my closet. At each of the televisions I have a hacked Xbox that serves as the front end. TV/Video/etc all come fine over the Ethernet connection. They all work at the same time, too. The Macs also work as front ends, so you can watch TV/video/whatever in the office while doing productive work, too.
I can ssh into the box from offsite (like from where I’m at right now) to manage recording, and even stream them to me in the field.
Because I don’t have a land line or PBX requirements, it really is a convergence box.
The only downside is my stupid Linksys router apparently has a buffer overflow bug that causes it lock up if I use certain protocols too much from offsite (it doesn’t like VNC for some reason). I should try to see if I can set up the Myth box as a router….