mythtv

I have an old Linksys WRT-54G v3. I have ran various different firmwares over the years, but performance was never a big deal. I was mainly looking for something that allowed to me to access all of the devices features and a nicer frontend than the one that Linksys provides. At one point I was using different firmwares for QOS when we were sharing our connection with some other people in our building. Anyways, I had been using X-Wrt (white russian) for quite some time. It is basically a nice user-friendly version of OpenWrt.

To all you MythTV users out there, if you use Zap2It Labs' freely available TV listings, there was some potentially sad news today. Zap2It Labs announced that their free TV guide service would no longer be available. If you are like me and you rely on this data source in order for your MythTV box to function, go to Zap2It's forums and let them know that you do not want the service to stop and if you are willing to pay for it, let them know that as well.

MythTV 0.20 was released today. I can't wait to install it and check out the new features. I completely rebuilt my MythTV box last week and it is totally kick-ass now. It has a new 250GB hard drive which allows me to record 100 hours of TV. Some other improvments I made were, setting up XvMC which allows my video card's GPU to help out with some of the MPEG-2 decoding (bringing my CPU usage from 20% to 10% during video playback). Thanks to the Hauppauge PVR-350 card my CPU usage during recording is nil. I also got a new video card with composite out rather than s-video. That fixed a problem with the flaky s-video connector I had (whereby it would slip out and cause the screen to go all fuzzy) and also fixed a problem I had with 3 vertical lines on the TV during playback. We also bought and expensive composite cable to make sure that there are no problems. Finally stuck everything in an Antec Sonata II case for maximum silencing and cooling (not to mention how cool the black case looks).