I am giving serious consideration to this.....any one have experience and or advice?

I tried it before and it was a pain to setup on RedHat. Could be a user error but I remember trying to get the channel listings working correctly and it was not making any sense.

Myth TV uh? I have a friend who finally got it to work. Lets just say that it will cost you alot of money. He ended up having to buy two new tuner cards. I think it will work okay, but you will need to have the right hardware. Just make sure your using Haupauge cards!

It's pretty easy. I have a buddy that set it up. The hardest part is getting the TV Tuner Card set up. You will probably want a Hap350...it seems to be the documented the best. Also you will want tons of HD space because you'll need it and want it! I took him about 3 hours to set up everything. You can get all the packages you need from apt-get. Just do some searching around on Myth-TV and you'll find tons of stuff. As soon as I get some money saved up I am for sure putting together a terabyte of space and getting a MythTV box running

Yep, that's real it's not that hard to set up a myth tv box, all depends on your dixtro and your hardware and also your country

I am French and I have to use a secam Tuner, which makes everything more difficult and to make thing even more difficult I don't do not the cable...

Anyway, if you have to choose a distro to install it I would say Fedora 1, there is a great how to to install it step by step.
And if you dare a bit more FC2, but you will need a kernel recompiling or wait a ivtv implement for 4k stacks.

HTH, if you have any questions feel free to ask!

Ludo

Do you need a separate box to run mythTV or is it feasible to run it off of your current machine?

I suppose you could run it off your existing machine if you wanted too, though I think it would defeat the purpose.

This is a good way to learn about linux. I would recommend that you have another machine that you are building it on. Once you get it set up it is pretty dedicated. If you are looking for more casual TV recording look elsewhere because mythtv is a fully-featured pvr system. I set mine up on a shuttle box running SuSE 9.0. I am currently in the process of getting it to work with 9.1 (kernel 2.6 based) and it is a bit of a pain. There are some big changes that happend between 2.4 and 2.6, at least to the point that some of the problems that I am seeing in lirc, and ivtv are not quite that easy to get around. SuSE also has its "own" way of doing things. I say give mythtv a try but this truly is a time commitment. I get mine working well and then I think of ways to make it better and then I break it, and have to fix it. I am rambling....

Yep, it's a bit tricky to find the correct line to use in your modprobe.conf which comes with kernel 2.6, but once its done, it works perfectly

And seagoj, I think starting on the same machine is not a problem to start playing around without investing money! But make sure to backup your important data... you never know

Ludo

Builds
I'd recommend actually building it yourself, dload the Qt stuff etc,
a lot of configuration takes place in the build process so installing it from packages isn't the easiest... (I tried on MDK with URPMI)
the thing is its documented... but according to setup DURING the build ... and its not a hard build so long as you follow it...I ended up trying to find the bits in the documentation like ./mythtv/src/setup.sh which of course is elsewhere and no longer called setup but there are quiter a few things like this ...

Coume - What do you know about the digital TV in France - Will it be the same as the UK since the whole SECAM/PAL issue dissapears!

I was in the UK the other week and saw the Hauppage digital TV tuners for £50 .... heck thats cheaper than the analogue tuners in France.. (90E for a PCTV Rave in FNAC)

The Secam/Pal issue should not disapear any soon Anyway not regarding the hertzian TV (through antenna)

But even with digital TV, I don't think that those norms will change anyway not in a close future
Ludo, who would love to have one tuner for all the countries...

Coume,
although the TV reception is SECAM the digital set top box just use the peritel (scart) socket to the video in... so the SECAM/PAL thing dissapears and only NTSC stays an oddity becuase of the scan rate.

Ive found many PC TV tuner cards do SECAM and PAL so they can be used in different countries... (and i have)

however I think the digital TV will be neither SECAM or PAL but DVB and so I hope this will be truly international, like satellite. It doesnt matter which country you are in becuase the satellite box decodes and uses the peritel to put the picture on your TV...