I've been doing some more reading, and it seems that MythTV is a logical choice for the Home Theatre PC I want to put together. Here are some of the features offered by MythTV:
- Basic 'live-tv' functionality. Pause/Fast Forward/Rewind "live" TV.
- Support for multiple tuner cards and multiple simultaneous recordings.
- Distributed architecture allowing multiple recording machines and multiple playback machines on the same network, completely transparent to the user.
- Compresses video in software using rtjpeg (from Nuppelvideo) or mpeg4 (from libavcodec). Full support for Hardware MPEG-2 encoder cards (Hauppauge PVR-250 / PVR-350). Preliminary support for DVB cards and the new pcHDTV tuner card.
- Support for the (very nice looking) hardware MPEG-2 decoder and TV out present on the Hauppauge PVR-350.
- Completely automatic commercial detection/skipping
- Grabs program information using xmltv.
- A fully themeable menu to tie it all together.
Here's what it looks like (the above info and the below screenshot are taken from the MythTV website):
All in all, this looks like a pretty good system. Of course, my wife will insist that it's aesthetically pleasing as well, and that could be more of a challenge...
