We hooked up the cable...

Yes, that's right. I'm ashamed to admit it, but Brandt and Solveig now have cable television. For the first time in the almost seven years that we've been together, we have a piece of equipment in our house that receives broadcast television (yeah, I consider cable to be "broadcast" even though it's over wires, not air, so deal).

If you know us well, then you're probably wondering what on earth could've happened to allow such a travesty. Are B & S not the die-hard anti-advertising eschewers-of-pop-culture that they claim to be?

Fret not, dear friends, for we are still they. You see, what's important about our cable hookup is not the fact that it is connected, but rather what it's connected to...

You see, Eno has been resurrected as a PVR, or Personal Video Recorder. In case you're wondering what that means, you've probably already heard of two most popular examples of PVRs: TiVo and ReplayTV. The upshot is that you program the device to record all of your favorite television shows, which you can then watch at your leisure sans commercials.

Now that's all fine and dandy, but if that's what I wanted to do then why didn't I just get a TiVo or ReplayTV? The obvious answer would be because they aren't open source, but the honest answer is that I didn't start out to make a PVR. All I wanted was a better user interface for the hodgepodge collection of multimedia stored on our media server, and I didn't want to write it myself. You see, Solveig and I have a lot of CD's, DVD's, etc, but hate having them all out cluttering up the living room. We also have a lot of (legally downloaded) MP3 files that we like to listen to. So I started collecting all this digital media in one place (that place being the half terabyte of storage on Eno) and ever since, we've done our movie-watching and music-listening on the projector and speakers hooked up to the computer. The only problem with this setup was that it required me to ssh into the server and issue esoteric command lines to play and record media.

Enter MythTV. Please take a break here and go check out the screenshots of MythTV features.

How'd you like that, eh? Live TV watching, with pause/rewind/fast-forward. Automatic commercial skipping. Electronic program guide and program finder. Scheduled program recordings. Web interface for remote control. Rip and store CDs and DVDs for later playback. Photo album. Weather. News. Games. All in an intuitive, pretty, and theme-able user interface. Since it's open source and easily extensible, new features are frequently being released almost as quickly as users dream them up.

Hooking up the cable was basically an afterthought. In order to take full advantage of MythTV we needed to use a remote control with the computer, so we needed an infrared interface. Since most TV tuner cards for the computer come with an interface, and can be had for about $100, it seemed like it'd be a waste to not get that extra bit of functionality.

I guess I should probably close by saying that not much has changed with our viewing habits. We still frequently geek out with Star Trek, it's just that we've been able to add Enterprise to the roster since now we don't have to wait for it to be released on DVD before we can view it without commercials. Also, Solveig is happy to report that we're finally up to quota on our animal shows. And there's still no TV in the house, just the easily-stowed projector.

Oh yeah, a warning to those of you who are thinking of doing something similar: beware of Goom. Goom is a visual effects generator for music, and our projector has spent more time showing goom than anything else ever since we installed MythTV. Like I said, beware...

If you choose to ignore my warning and proceed, I have to recommend that you start with Fedora. After installing Fedora, your MythTV box is only a "apt-get install mythtv-suite" away! (See Jarod C. Wilson's excellent MythTV on Fedora HOWTO for more info.)