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Part II: Home Entertainment
Wrapping Up
That wasn’t too bad, was it? We’ve gotten a fair amount of functionality
with entirely free software, and we can control the whole thing from the
couch.
However, it’s important to remember that this is a computer and it’s always
connected to the Internet. Make sure you keep up with all of the security
patches from Red Hat. Better yet, automate it using the Red Hat Network.
Now you can schedule your HTPC to capture every episode of Good Eats so
they’ll be readily available every time you forget why eggs are so amazing.
Extensions
While we’ve created a machine that can really do a lot, there are still some
ways we can improve it. If there’s room in your budget why not add a second
tuner? This resolves single scheduling conflicts and there’s rarely a need for
recording more than two shows simultaneously.
MythTV also makes is possible to have the machine running as a server,
recording shows that can be rebroadcast to other PCs on your network. You
could even create a web interface that allows you to watch your recorded
shows from anywhere on the Internet.
The software we’ve chosen records video using regular MPEG codecs,
which makes it easy to transfer the video to SVCDs or DVDs. You can
archive the entire season of your favorite shows for viewing whenever you
want without giving up storage on the hard drives.
Myt ...