Linux and TV Tuners

Just a follow-up to a prior post about TV tuner cards under Linux.  Well, the prior issue was that I was working with an external USB tuner.  I've since picked up a Hauppauge HVR-1600 PCI dual-tuner board.  (This was well under $100 at Best Buy.)  It features one analog tuner (for analog cable) and one digital tuner (for ATSC over-the-air HD).

There were a couple video4linux hoops to jump through to get this card working with MythTV, but those were addressed very well in this wiki article on the MythTV wiki site.  It only took me about an hour to get the whole setup working (that included fixing some permissions issues with my NTFS formatted external USB drive).

I've since been using MythTV to schedule all my recordings, and have begun looking into streaming options to get those shows pushed out to all the other terminals in the complex without jumping through even more hoops.  I plan to add a second board soon to help eliminate the few scheduling conflicts I have where I need to record more than 1 HD show at a time.

For now, I'm limited to watching them on the living room TV because I haven't yet found a UPnP solution that works seamlessly with the XBox 360.