For a long time I've been wanting to setup the ultimate media center on one of my machines -- something that unifies serving video, music, and any other random whims that I might have. Obviously one option is the TiVo w/ HMO, but unfortunately DirecTV prefers to not release this feature. Besides, if I ever wanted to write my own plugins to the system, it's not nearly as hackable as an open source project would be.

Along comes MythTV -- A Linux-based open source PVR system. This thing is really developing quickly and is a really slick little system. I've been sort of on the bleeding edge with it the past couple of weeks by immediately buying a WinTV PVR250, which has both an alpha driver for linux and alpha support in MythTV. But personally, I didn't want to buy a sweet machine just to handle MPEG encoding/decoding. Well it turns out I chose wisely, because both the IVTV driver team and the MythTV team are moving very quickly wrt the PVR250.

Just thought I'd pass it along ... It has some serious potential.

http://www.mythtv.org -- for the MythTV page
http://ivtv.sourceforge.net -- for the PVR250 driver page