So, the Linux/PVR box that I built is having problems with the kernel panicking, the audio not sounding to great (it is a little tinny), and the remote still not working in MythTV. But having a PVR has totally changed my life (well, maybe I'm exaggerating). But still, I'm watching way more TV than I have been -- but it is a better, more concentrated form of TV. I managed to snag the Star Wars documentary "Empire of Dreams: The Story of the Star Wars Trilogy" on A&E for example -- something that I never would have sat down and watched without a PVR.
That being said, however, this crashing thing needs to stop. I suspect that it is something wrong with the driver for the capture card (the 'ivtv' driver) -- possibly that it is not SMP-safe. I'm having a hard time getting the error message when the box crashes, however, because when it goes down, it goes down hard. And I don't have a text console on the thing that I can just read the error message from. So, I'm going to investigate the netconsole feature of Linux, to see if that will help me capture the error.
I think though, that there is only so much debugging that I am going to be interested in doing before I just break down and buy a Tivo. This one from pioneer is really tempting, if it weren't $800 freakin' dollars...!
-Andy.
See, this is why I won't get a tivo. I already waste too much time in front of the tube. If I had a device giving me TV that I normally wouldn't see, I might as well just become a quadriplegic and never move again.
As an update -- I found that the Pioneer Tivo/DVD burner that I'm sniffing around is only $600 dollars now -- the catalog that I was looking at yesterday is old. And the Tivo rebate applies to it, so if I were to buy the lifetime service ($300), then I could get $100 back via mail-in rebate. But still, that's $800!! I could definitely build a PC with a DVD burner for cheaper than that...
-Andy.