A follow up on the “Free-vo”, the home-made Tivo idea I posted a few weeks back.

Last weekend I took my Mandrake Linux installation and began the long process of setting up Myth TV. Myth lets you record TV and watch it at the same time. It also has a bunch of other features such as tv listings and weather reports. Unfortunately, it is NOT easy to setup. In fact it’s a friggin nightmare. There’s no native binaries in the download so you have compile all source on your machine. In otherwords you need GCC. The software relies on mySQL (for some weird reason) and also needs LAME audio encoding. All-in-all it’s a major hassle so I gave up.

I wiped the machine and put Windows Media XP edition on there. You may have noticed Microsoft booths popping up in the malls. Basically Media Center is an add-on to windows XP. You run it like an application and it takes up the entire screen.

It gives you similar functionality to Tivo except the you can do things like slideshows of digital photos and listen to MP3s. It also has some other features like downloadable movies (movies on demand) through Movielink.com.

XP Media Edition is not bad but it’s a bit of a hog in terms of system resources. I think the home-made Tivo idea is still viable and I’m going to pursue it but the dream of using my crappy Pentium III is slowly slipping away.

The one small success I had was to pump my computer’s video output into my TV. The desktop can even be shared across the monitor and the TV, even with them each having different resolutions.

More to follow.