I’ve either tested or used for an extended period of time several different media center products for the PC, so I thought I’d write some opinions I have about each one of them.  Take this with a grain of salt, since everyone’s requirements and aesthetic tastes are different.

Well, I gave MythTV a good go, but in the end I had to ditch it.  I had endless problems getting my USB tuners to come back up reliably after sleep, and I also had some strange crashes and other issues.

As discussed earlier, I’ve been rebuilding my Media Center with MythTV running on Fedora 15.  I’ve been having a number of … issues … with it.  Fortunately I’ve gotten a lot of them finally nailed down.

By default, Windows 7 will not allow access to the C$ administrative share, so you’ll have trouble getting BackupPC to work.  To solve this, run up Registry Editor and set the following registry key;

I was having some trouble getting BackupPC to back up my MythTV’s operating system to my Microserver.  I kept getting aborts all the time from broken pipes and such.

After reading some more about what can be done with MythTV, I thought I’d take the plunge.  Previously, my Media Center was running Windows 7 Ultimate with Media Center.  I have two Hauppauge HVR-2200 PCI-Express dual tuners, and an nVidia 9500 GT graphics card with HDMI output.  I also have a huge pile of recorded TV in Windows Television (WTV) format, which was quite the obstacle because only Media Center can play that.