sagetv

In a fit of nostalgia, Mike Garcen over at Missing Remote took a trip down memory lane and wrote up a brief history of HTPC technology.

If you're a long time tinkerer, you've probably been finding ways to watch TV on your PC since the late 90s. I'll never forget the thrill of installing my first ATI All-in-Wonder card, only to realize that garbage in = garbage out. I didn't have cable at the time, and trying to encode digital video from bunny ears wasn't the smartest move I'd ever made.

Ironically, 8 years later I've just picked up an HDTV antenna in the hopes of recording over-the-air high definition signals with a PCI TV tuner.

Garcen also takes a look at some early HTPC cases, remote controls, and HDTV sets you may have had your eye on back in 1996.

Right, so you're sitting on the couch watching a movie, and you can't for the life of you remember whether you're supposed to pick your spouse up from the airport tonight, or tomorrow. What're you gonna do? Well, you could turn off the TV, walk into the other room and check your Google Calendar. Or if you're running SageTV Media Center, you could hit pause, flip over to this new Google Calendar plugin, and then flip back over to the film all without getting up from your couch.

It's amazing how much work people are willing to put into programs that help us be lazy.

Ubuntu and its siblings Kubuntu and Xubuntu are widely considered some of the easiest Linux distributions for non-geeks to set up and use. But that doesn't make setting up a Linux based media center any simpler.

Sure, you could just install Knoppmyth or Mythdora if all you want is a PC running MythTV. But what if you want a multipurpose PC?

Well, there's some good documentation for setting up a MythTV frontend, backend, or both on Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. A backend is a machine that can record TV shows and store photos, videos, and music. It acts as a server, letting frontend PCs on the network play back those files. Or you can install a frontend and a backend on a single PC.

The process isn't quite as simple as installing PC-based software like BeyondTV or SageTV, but the walkthrough makes installation about as easy as it gets.

Mike Garcen of Missing Remote has written up a detailed comparison of three programs that leverage your PC to let you watch live TV from any internet-connected PC.

Orb, WebGuide4 and SageTV Placeshifter are all programs that let you access your home computer to watch and record live TV over the internet. SageTV Placeshifter is designed to work with SageTV, and has an interface that looks just like the desktop application. WebGuide4 works with Windows Media Center, and Orb works with pretty much anything.

While BeyondTV was busy pushing out a point release of its PC-based PVR software, competitor SageTV has been working on its own series of updates. Over the last week, SageTV developers have issued several release candidates for several software updates, featuring a total of 110 bug fixes.

SageTV is a complete media center suite that runs on Linux or Windows PCs, with a place-shifting client for Mac (meaning you can stream recorded programs from your PC to a Mac). Unlike BeyondTV, SageTV provides a 10-foot interface for accessing music, photos, online video, and stored videos. In other words, it does pretty much all the same things that you can do with Windows Media Center, but provides far more in the way of user customization options. I'll be curious to see how programs like these do now that Microsoft is including Media Center functionality in several retail versions of Vista.

[via Missing Remote]