On 14-Feb-06, at 8:23 AM, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> My problem with TiVo, other than that it isn't as much fun, is that
> it's a service: you pay for it on an ongoing basis, they have the  
> right
> and the ability (which they've exercised) to change the features on
> your device, and -- most important -- they can monitor what you watch.

To be fair; if you're using MythTV with a tuner card, then you need  
to get program listings somewhere.  Unless you're using DVB, then you  
get your program listings by the good graces of labs.zap2it.com which  
is an XML feed for your channel selection.  They provide this service  
free and experimentally... It's a valuable service and I'm grateful  
they're providing it to us. But I'm not fooling myself into thinking  
they will continue to offer it for free if they think they can make a  
buck off it.  They chose the offer the service because too many  
people were screen-scraping the interactive and expensively-rendered  
pages in order to get guide info, so it saves them money to provide  
the XML feeds.  Lately, there's been a plea for people to distribute  
their mythfilldatabase times because the load on their servers was  
getting too high.  This indicates to me that a significant quantity  
of people are taking advantage of this service and hence, it is at  
risk of turning 'for pay'.

I run MythTv at home.  I have a frontend/backend running Lignux with  
a PVR-250 hooked up to my satellite receiver; and use lirc for IR  
transmission and reception.  I also have an Xbox as a mythfrontend  
upstairs for my wife to watch her shows.  The wife-acceptance-factor  
is actually quite high but it's far from a production-ready system.   
Lignux has lots of warts and mythtv has even more.  I've been  
experimenting with a DVB card that I bought.  I built a seperate  
backend box ... I intend to decode the signals (in effect pirate  
them) but since I'm paying for my subscription, I will choose to  
decode them only because my provider doesn't offer the service in a  
way that I want.  I'll continue paying for my service but use  
'piracy' to get my subscription into a form that's more useful to me  
than a D->A->D transition.

It's hard to get your first Myth box up and running correctly/ 
reliably because the quality of 'help' out there is deplorable...  
There are a million penguinistas hacking away randomly and then  
posting their results on forums and, at best, it really is just a  
million penguins banging away at typewriters... Very difficult to  
find the Shakespeare in all the entropy.