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Comment by allenbina | Hacker News Reader

I tried to get this to work multiple times around 2004. This might be where I first dove into linux. I gave up every time. I ended up using windows media center which worked flawlessly for years. I moved on to plex and a hdtvhomerun when they released it (it handles deleting old series, etc). About a year ago I realized I don't really watch live TV anymore and unplugged it.

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Similar for me, except I got it working after tens of hours invested. After wasting time with nonstandard hardware, I got a Hauppauge PVR series capture card with hardware MPEG2 encoding. That made all the difference.

I was in college at the time and had free HBO on the dorm cable network, plus completely unfiltered 100mbps ethernet throughout the campus. It was fun to have a "DIY Tivo" server that could automatically remove commercials and make my library available to my suitemates.

In case this resonates with anyone else's nostalgia, the highlight of my time with MythTV was setting up a system to automatically transcode episodes of selected shows to 320x250 for my iPod video which I could then sync and watch on a plane. Heady stuff for 2005-2006.

Similar for me but I never made a serious attempt at MythTV because I never had dedicated hardware in those days. So I ended up installing XP MCE on my main machine (you could minimize/exit Media Center and it was just plain Windows underneath).

Used that for a while then went down the XBMC path (for windows..pre-Kodi for a while). Ended up with a Boxee Box (first real dedicated hardware). Then moved to Plex hosted on a Windows Home Server with various clients over the years (Sony NSZ-GS7 Google TV, OG Chromecast, Nexus Player, one of the older FireTVs, Chromecast Ultra).

The Home Server died so I moved to UnRaid with containerized Plex. Had a HDHomeRun Prime integrated with Plex for a bit. But dropped cable in favor of streaming TV services. That's the closest I ever got to a MythTV setup.

I learned most of what I know about Linux trying over years to set up and maintain a MythBuntu box

Same here. Tried multiple times, but it was just too rough.

I ended up creating a barebones DVR from scratch in FreeBSD, which I was more familiar with than Linux. I kept adding incremental features over the next few years, until it was a very usable system, and exactly suitable for my needs.

Then the internet became fast enough to stream and download content, and the old workhorse ended up in a closet somewhere.

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