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...

Well, it has been a while, so I thought I better at least complete this thought regarding XBMC.  Overall, it is one of the slickest open source projects I’ve encountered.  Well run, well designed, and very active.  However, there are some downsides.  Let me break this down as well as I can from my perspective: XBMC – The Good: Super fast and...

It’s been a little too long since my last post–apologies.  Here’s what I’ve found out since: The pre-built Xebian/Myth distro seems to have trouble finding my backend server.  Which is strange, as they are both on the same 100MB network segment.  It complains about no UPnP sources. Apparently no one can watch live TV on the...

Yes, I will now be referring to these efforts as the Joseph Baxter’s Smart Home Media Project ™.  There’s no way I’ll be able to resist coming up with some sort of logo for that, I’m sure. So, now to the part that, quite frankly, spooked me a little.  Yeah, the Myth stuff was fairly hard, and my Linux knowledge is somewhat...