Originally published at www.linux.com on December 09, 2008 at 09:00 AM; reprinted with the author’s permission. Digital video recorders (DVR) are becoming more and more mainstream. TiVo, in fact, has passed the truest test of any popular technology — having its name transformed into a verb. MythTV, a free and open source application that lets...

I’m very happy with MythTV up to this point. It is no where near as fragile as I feared it might be–in fact, it seems to be quite robust. A recent power outage knocked its pins out from under it, but by the time I checked, the machine was already back up and running. Part of that is the BIOS setting “Last State on Power Restore,” but if the...