FIRSTLY:

Thank you everyone involved with this project! I can honestly say it is BY FAR the most interesting video related "toy" I've worked with.

THE GOOD:

MythTV is fantastic, and KnoppMyth made for a reasonably painless install.

Running MythTV is much more convenient for me; as a consultant & photographer I have a crazy schedule and usually missed my shows... not anymore! And fast forwarding through commercials... that's the ticket!

THE BAD:

I've tried all the sample twinview configurations... and I am still having problems.

One of them actually works, but only as long as the 800x600;640x480 is the last setting, and I cycle to that resolution with CTRL-ALT-+ will not work if I change the order of the resolution pairs, or put that as the only pair. ARGH.

I'd prefer to get 800x600; 800x600 running, with overscan, as I currently get a black border. I have not given up yet.

The backend also occasionally dies... this was significantly helped by going into the BIOS and forcing AGP2X instead of 4X, but it still occurs at times... very annoying... I'm considering writing a daemon script to check for the backend responding every second and relaunching it if there is no response.

TODO LIST FOR ME:

- Get my Motorola DC2000 cable box hooked up & hopefully serial control will work; if not make an IRBlaster (I know which end of a soldering iron gets hot)

- Get my bt848 based PCI FlyView tuner card installed and see if it can work as a second tuner with acceptable performance on my box (Athlon 1800+, 256Mb PC2100 DDR, Via KT266 uATX, Hauppage PVR250, GeForce 440MX 64Mb w/TV out, Maxtor 160Gb 7200rpm 8Mb cache, CD-RW)

- see if there is some way (maybe a web page?) of building some scripts to burn dvd's with a menu of selected shows with a simple menu easily

- if the bt848 does not work out, get and install a second PVR250, or if I continue to have TV out issues, a PVR350

- look into Windows front end, XBox front end, or HTPC case... my current MythTV is in a noisy 18" ATX tower, NOT something I want in/near my audio cabinet.

- see about changing the behaviour of the "Record" button on the remote... the current default action (record until end of current program on current channel) is OK 90% of the time... but what about if I wanted to record three hours? four? a hockey game? or use Myth to digitize existing VHS tapes? My idea is:

---- one press of Record button - works as it currently does, stops recording at the scheduled end of the current show

---- two presses of Record button - unlimited record, until "stop" is pressed or out of disc space (maybe configurable max in setup at X hours)

---- third press 30min... each additional press adds 30min