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This, of course, makes Myth (or anything else hackable or programmable) an attractive option (since I could, conceivably, rig it to "read" e-mails and program itself accordingly). However, I don't think I have patience to build my own box at the moment...


Well, I wouldn't certainly call setting up MythTV easy, and it's not particularly cheap, but getting the basic functionality out of it is downright trivial if you choose your hardware well and use Knoppmyth. If you buy a Hauppauge 250 or 350 tuner card, a network card that works with Linux, and pretty much any decent motherboard and chip, setting up the software to watch and record live Tv and have the program guide (in the United States anyway) can be done in probably 20 minutes or so, with little Linux knowledge required. And a lot of that is waiting for the HD to format and such. I know you can get guide info for it for just about anywhere in the world, but I don't know how hard it is to setup.

It's all the other stuff that takes the time, like getting the remote working or using tuner cards other than those two I listed or interfacing to my windows box or getting Internet radio on it or the billions of other things this thing can do. It doesn't help that my Linux knowledge is a bit limited.
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Ninti - MK IIa 60GB Smoke, 30GB, 10GB