The alternatives.

I have ben asked a couple of times "Why MythTV?". I really have no good answer for those that have not tried it themselves, so I usually give a summary of the features list.
But there are alternatives, one of which I have tried myself. I'll start with that one:

Freevo
Very popular system written i Python. This makes it really flexible and easy to write plugins to, which shows in the number of plugins available. I decided to leave Freevo since it was a bit on the slow side and, more importanly, did not behave at all the way I and my girlfriend expected it to.



One should also mention the DVR project which aims to replace the VCR, nothing more. It records shows from an EPG and is able to display them. Good enough for some people, but I and my family. No point in having a screen shot of this one.

Leaving the Linux world and looking at Windows XP MCE reivals, I find a two projects workt taking a look at:


GB-PVR
A .NET based approach that seems to have attracted a good following Open Source world. There are loads of plugins and themes, including a PIM applications and email checking. Some skins are quite similar to the appearance of MCE:




Media Portal
Another feature-rich Windows media center. From the features list, I get the impression that this one acctually rivals MythTV in features, and has DVD burning included also. For MythTV there is only a web-based plugin so far (which caused me some trouble last week). However, a friend tells me it is quite slow sometimes.