Several years ago, maybe 4 or 5, I remember discussing the merits of Tivo with friend/co-worker. I was a hold out of this great piece of technology. He had one. He extolled the virtues of the Tivo by claiming it was a life changing experience. I was still a hold out... mainly because of a little phone system problem in my house, which is a subject for another time.

I never dropped the idea of a DVR, though. It's a great piece of technology. Other co-workers had Windows Media Center system. One had a Replay TV. Yet others had DVR systems provided by the local cable company. I talked and talked about getting a DVR, but never pulled the trigger.

One day about 3 years ago, I was contemplating what to do with some old PC hardware sitting around the house, as my wife was getting sick of seeing and shifting it around every time we went through the garage. My discussions and informal research into DVR options brought me in touch with MythTV. I had a quick conversation with my wife about the idea of building a MythTV system. I got the go ahead to spend a few bucks and thus began my little MythTV hobby about 3 years ago.

I purchased a few components to complete a base media center including an inexpensive video tuner card and started building. The Ubuntu Linux distro was gaining more and more popularity, so this became the base for my system.

I get about an hour a night to work on my own stuff, so it took me about a month to get the first system off the ground. This involved a number of iterations to get the right process down, which included these primary steps:

• Install Ubuntu Desktop with build dependencies for MythTV
• Compile and install MythTV
• Compile and install ivtv
• Flash my Happauge PVR-150 tuner card
• Compile and install lirc for my Windows Media Center v2 remote
• Configure X to output to the S-Video
• Start recording and watching

I spent most of my time with ivtv and lirc, which was not entirely straight forward. I owe a lot to Daniel Hyams and his wonderful step-by-step instructions for helping me get this online. All in all, I enjoyed this process and experienced a great deal of satisfaction once I started recording and watching the entire Stargate SG-1 series.

Soon after I wrapped this up, I tackled the challenge of putting a frontend system together using even older hardware for another room in the house. This won over my wife and entire family and entrenched the system in the household. The life changing experience my friend alluded to was here. We all love commercial flagging and full library music. The kids love that they get to see all Suite Life of Zack and Cody, Pokemon and Naruto shows. I love that I get to see all Formula One coverage I could care to see.

This system ran with one minor flaw with the original free listings source for MythTV, which required me to frantically recompile a new version of MythTV and update my listings in June 2007. (Thank you folks at SchedulesDirect.) Until the weekend before last when I started hearing funny noises from the hard drive in my master backend.

I had been thinking about upgrading my Ubuntu 6.06 Desktop prior to this little issue and I heard about the Mythbuntu distribution. I told my wife a hard drive purchase was required, ordered it, downloaded the Mythbuntu 8.04 distribution, and waited for the drive to arrive.

The drive arrived. I shut everything down, installed my new drive and sat down for the process of setting up a new MythTV system using Mythbuntu. I expected a few days of down time (amounting to about 3 to 4 hours of actual work) to get everything back online.

Mythbuntu surprised me, though. It configured everything from the tuner cards, the remote and the video card with everything including the S-Video out. The only hiccup I encountered was restoring the database for my recorded shows. I tried doing this over the mythconverg database installed by mythbuntu, so when the auto-database upgrade (what an awesome piece of work in the MythTV code) tried to run it had some problems with tables that already existed.

The frontend is almost ready now... just need to enable the SPDIF out on the audio card and everything will be back the way it was... only better.

Mythbuntu Rocks!