Sorry Mark, I meant to reply to Jim, obviously you know 'a bit' about Linux!!

* Before they got the EIT parser working, the programme guide here in the UK used to get scraped from a website. It took ages and the resultant data wasn't always accurate.

* When I moved over to the Sky Navigator remote it took ages to set up, even after LIRC had been set up. Although that's partly because it has a full QWERTY keyboard on it.

* It happens now and again on mine. Although not often enough to require me to do anything about it other than restart the process. A cron task to check that there's still a process called mythbackend running or something?

* Done that bar the DVD player, I haven't the storage to convert the 250-odd DVDs I own!

* Did think about that, but now my backend also hosts my VPN, mail, DNS and web servers and just about everything else. So even when it's not recording or playing, odds are it's doing something else!