All Things Patrick - Working Hard to be Lazy!

I've been talking about putting together a set of MythTV boxes for quite a while. I've been looking at hardware for the last couple of years and last summer I had stumbled across an mini-ITX board that I wanted to test, but I had need a file server, my job ended, and then I got overly busy with a new job. This last christmas I ended up buying parts for a new desktop (the timing just ended up being right) and the project got delayed again.

A friend of mine has kept nagging me about why would I want to build my own and possibly spend a lot of money on this crap if I could just spend money over time to rent a TiVo or whatever cable company's DVR. When I was down in Tulsa this last year I did just that - I rented a dvr from Cox cable and other than the hard drive being to small (and not being able to upgrade), being limited to 2 channels total, and not being able to archive something for later viewing... it worked great! Well, at least until I was getting ready to move out... I had been keeping up with a particular series and hadn't had time to watch a couple episodes and as I was heading up to visit my parents I figured I'd drag it along and show my parents the greatness of what a dvr does. I plugged it into the TV and got nothing initially. I then figured I'd plug it into their cable and see if that might help and if I might be able to record something from their cable provider... How niave. Plugging it into their cable provider completely reset the dvr (deleting everything I had recorded and had been hoping to watch). Ok, my stuff is gone, but surely I can at least record stuff for them - even on the non digital channels that don't require a set top box? Nope, nothing... just sat there trying to configure itself and boot up. Of course, when I got back to Tulsa it came right up, reconfigured itself, and was ready to go - I think it even remembered what TV shows I was recording. Yay for proprietary crap.