Hey all, I'm doing research on my own but since this board is here, I thought I would at least ask around for other peoples' experiences. I'm trying to find the "best" solution for my needs for a TV recording platform.

A few short explanations first:
I'm running KnoppMyth now, unsure what release but it's got MythTV .20, not -fixes (I think -- how do I check?). I haven't upgraded in a bit over a year, I think. It's an old Athlon 850 box with maybe half a gig of RAM, capturing on a PVR-150. Most of the time, I just leave the shows in MPEG-2 in the standard NUV container until I watch and delete them; sometimes I use one of the export Perl scripts to make e.g. Xvid for long-term storage. Obviously, I've been using it for a while, so I consider my "recorded programs" list to be highly valuable.
I currently watch my shows mostly on a Windows box over a network share, but would like to be able to get away from that and start using my Xbox 360 (not modded or anything) and/or Playstation 2 (also not modded, though it is a "fat" model with a network adapter, so I *could* install a hard drive).
I have not "fixed" my Myth box to use SD yet -- see this post for my problem (in short, there's a GCC bug, I am not a guru and apt-get install gcc wants to remove a bunch of important packages).
I currently "manage" the TV stuff almost exclusively, but I'd like to add a little more "user friendliness" to it so my wife can be more involved -- I see migrating to the 360 as a step in the right direction.


So, my question to the group is, what suits my needs? I'm currently thinking either the newest KnoppMyth (last upgrade took a day or two, which is longer than I'd like, but I forget why) or installing one of the Media Center Windows builds. I don't know a lot about MCE, but I know it would at least stream to the 360 like a champ. I figured there had to be one or two people who wanted to go from Myth to MCE, so there's probably *some* method of importing my list of watched shows, I just don't know how.


Anyway, if anybody has some guidance to help me make my choice, or a 3rd option that sounds like a good idea, I'd like to hear it.

See the R5F27 hints. Much discussion of things you're asking like how to check what version, what is involved in an upgrade to R5F27, ...

I can reliably do an upgrade in under 30 minutes. Less experienced users may take a couple hours, but that's going pretty slow and double checking everything.

Thanks for your quick reply! Is "hints" a *thing* now, like a howto or a man page? I mean, are other projects including "hints" now?

"A Thing"

It was just a title I picked quite a while back. I've done a hints posting of some type for every release since R5B7. My signature includes a link to the current one.

For historical interest here's the original, "Some Hints for upgrading to R5B7". Since then it's been "Upgrade hints and hazards", "Hints and hazards", and now just "Hints". As the name has gotten shorter the hints themselves have gotten far longer and more detailed.

KnoppMyth vs windows media center. The winner is KnoppMyth. Those that want to go from MythTV to mce have been committed. Since your recordings are MPEG2, as long as the 360 (I know or care nothing about the 360) can play MPEG2, it should see the recordings via UPnP. I'd suggest asking about this on the MythTV mailing list or searching the archives.