Sometime in the next few months I'll be completing my MythTv box. I was curious from other who have built them, what's my best bet?

Knopmyth? Mythbuntu? Mythdora? Just starting from any distro and obtaining the deb/rpm packages for Myth tv?

I have experience with Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora (I run one computer of each) so that's not important. What's important is for it to work with the Hauppauge 500 I'm planning to buy as well as the MiniQ barebones PC I have.

Other than that, whichever is easy to install and has packages for all the plugins (mame, weather, etc) is the one I want.

Thanks for your suggestions and all that!

MythTV is not so important as the drivers for your card.

I would go with a normal distro, and then install the MythTV packages. I have MythTV running very well this way.

Before you can install MythTV, you will need to get the drivers installed for your card. Search Google for doing this.

--Ian

Do the pre-setup distros (mythbuntu, etc) not already take care of this?

Possibly. Give it a go.

--Ian

I afraid if they could include proprietary drivers. Normally distro includes the drivers which are open and available for community.. You might be able to check with distro supported hardware list whether it support your card or not.

It's been about a year since I built it. I ended up going with Mythdora and after a little bit of work to get the proper nVidia drivers, it worked (and continues to work) perfectly. I was able to upgrade when the latest MythTV came out to the latest Mythdora. If I had to do it again, I'd probably go with MythBuntu as Ubuntu tends to have smoother upgrades.