After reading your post I decided to see how long it would take to setup a box here with MythTV. It took me roughly an hour to recompile the kernel, put in the WinTV card, install all the prerequisites, install MythTV itself, and run through the MythTV setup.

Very nice so far, and I like that the backend and frontend can be two separate machines. Now I just need to move some things around and find the rest of the cables that goto the WinTV card so I can actually hook it up to the TV, record some shows, and see how the menus work.