A kind reader (I know, a reader! God bless you, google search...) sent me the following email:
"Hey, I'm in the middle of building myself a PVR and stumbled across your articles on switching from MythTV to Win MCE. How did the switch go? Did you ever come back to MythTV? And have you tried an Xbox 360 as an extender yet? Thanks for the helpful blog"
So these are my random thoughts on the topic:
I have no intentions of ever back to MythTV. It's a pain. Windows MCE is very, very easy. Guess how many tweaks I had to make to my lircd.conf file to get my remote to work with MCE? I'll give you a hint, it was less than 1 and rhymes with 'hero'.
I have no intention of dropping the MCE machine in favor of a crappy PVR from my local cable monopolist. They aren't that great, and I'll wait for cable card for HD. Why? Extenders. I don't want to record Monk on three PVR's throughout the house. I want to record it once and have it available from anywhere. MCE lets me do this.
The 360 as an extender is really good, but not great. It's easy to setup, it's not much more expensive than a standard extender (assuming you go Core), and it'll do HD content. Plus you've got that whole 'video games' thing going, if you're into that.
The 360 turns off. When I had a PC in my living room, it was loud, 24x7. The 360 is definitely not silent, but when the TV's off, so is the 360, so silence is restored. This is in direct contrast to the MCE PC, which was cranking all day and night. The 360's only loud when I'm watching TV, which is exactly when you can't hear it.
No Divx/Xvid. Sad, sad, sad. Because I lost my ability to watch divx/xvid, I was forced to buy a separate component, and an add-on accessory to run custom software to watch divx remotely. But that's a whole separate rant.
So I like it, I really do. It's got it's quirks and shortcomings, but it's the best solution I've found.
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