I currently have a nice system up and running and in use by wife and 3 kids. The current setup is a combination FE/BE and a sepearte FE running R5A30.2. We use it 90% for watching recordings (including programs that are currently being recorded), 5% music, and maybe 5% for live TV.

Having read the change log, myth 19 seems to be mostly changes to Live TV with some fixes for some other small problems.

I am looking for opinions of those that have 19 up and running. Is the upgrade to 19 "worth it". The tinkerer in me wants to move ahead but I dread the wrath of the family for troubles so I am trying to balance the risk/rewards.

What do you think?

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LINHES 8.6.1 BE/FE - MSI K9N6SGM-V with AMD A64 X2 4600+, 4GB Ram. 1.5TB WD. HDHR Prime. Nvidia GT210. MCE remote.
FrontEnd - Dell Vostro 400 3.0GHz Core2Duo NVidia GeForce210. MCE Remote

There will always be something later and greater. I'd say stick with what you have working right now. If "issues" develop, you can update at that time. Just my $0.02.

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I just took the plunge to R5B7 and some very nice improvements.

What I ended up doing was buying a removable drive cage ($10) and a cheap 80GB drive ($10 after rebates) then did a fresh install. This allowed me to keep my R5A30.2 install intact if anything went south. You though sound further compliated by the frontend only install. Can a .19 frontend connect to a .18.1 backend? If so frontend may be a good 1st victim.

I seriously doubt this.

I can confirm that a 0.19 frontend can NOT connect to an 0.18.1 backend. Or at least I can confirm that an R5B7 install of 0.19 couldn't connect to my R5A16 version of 0.18.1.

MythTV 0.19 has got some very nice improvements including fixes or enhancements for a number of issues that used to drive me nuts. For example, no more getting bumped by a scheduled recording and missing the last 10 minutes of something because you were behind real time.

As for upgrade I've gotten fairly adventurous lately. Given a good back up and having scripted all of my tweaks, I consider an hour to be plenty of time to both try a new version and revert to the previous version if it doesn't fly right away. Not to mention that the install and setup scripts have gotten much slicker.

There is a hints posting for the R5B7 upgrade that should help you figure out what prep work you need to do, and make this painless as a result.