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Simon Avery wrote: > I use a DVR on my windows pc which has two freeview tuners and that > works very well and has an impressively wide range of channels with no > encryption or card/cam required - worth doing if you want to record a > series of a program in one click, and watch back on a laptop or tv out > at your leisure. Sadly when I researched DVR's, I had a lot of problems > finding reliable and well featured software that supported my cards for > linux. Windows at the time had several good free options so I had to go > that route. Shame and I hope it's changed now. MythTV is pretty good in that respect now, to the point where we rarely watch television any other way (I don't even have a freeview-capable aerial or STB connected to the main television). I have a CentOS5 backend with two twin-tuner DVB-T cards in, with a diskless front-end for the kids running minimyth and a soon-to-be-diskless front-end for "the grown-ups" based on my own CentOS5 install/build. I also run a windowed front-end on my desktop PC so I can listen to radio programmes whilst working. Generally I schedule recordings using the web interface because it's faster than using a remote control. There are still a few niggles -- the music plugin is a bit ropey, exporting to stand-alone video formats doesn't always work sanely where the recorded channel has aspect ratio changes, and some of the USB-based tuners have occasional problems (mostly that's a v4l problem rather than mythtv), but generally "it just works". Slated for the next major release is a "virtual tuner" system that allows recordings of different channels on the same DVB-T mux to be made at the same time using only one tuner. I look forward to all my potential recording clashes disappearing when that happens. All that said, it's still a relatively complex bit of software to get installed and working, so probably not for the faint of heart. The users mailing list is also fairly heavy traffic -- up to several hundred posts a day. James -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html