Many of my friends are impressed with Windows Media Center. On checking with some PC vendors, I learned that its just a PC + TV Tuner Card + Windows + Software to control the TV and do the recording.

What is needed is any TV Tuner Card. If you need to record then TV Tuner Card with hardware MPEG encoder would be preferred.

This can easily be done on Linux as well. You can also save some money Hauppauge is considered to be a good TV tuner card and works well with Linux too.

On Linux there are two good open source software which can achieve this: Freevo and MythTV.

Freevo is easy to use and quicker to setup.

MythTV is suppose to be considered more stable and also allows you to pause TV programs while watching them. When you do that, it starts recording in the background.

Setting up MythTV may be more complex but there are ways to speed that up. The best bet is to use Knoppmyth. This is bootable CD (based on knoppix) which is already preconfigured with MythTV. All you have to do it boot from this CD, it will load Linux + MythTV. However if you want record, you will need to install to the hard disk.

If you are installing MythTV on SUSE Professional 9.3 then this guide will be a definite help.

Newsforge also has an article on this.

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