This is a chronicle of my experiences creating my own personal video recorder.. see the History page for an explanation of how I got here. Updates are on the News page, a description of the machines I'm using are on the Hardware page. The Software page is a good overview of the different pieces of code I'm using, and the Goodies page is all about the over-the-top bling-bling that I added for no other good reason than it sounded / looked cool. Finally, I've got a few things up on the Downloads page that others might find useful.

[UPDATE 5/6/08]

I'm ashamed to admit that it's been three years since I updated this page. Thing is, my myth system has been so stable that only occasional nudges are required to keep things running. In the last year, I've had to apply some DST patches for the change in daylight savings time, upgraded to v0.20 to get Schedules Direct support, I added more hard drive space, and added another box to do network file storage. I decommisionned one of the xbox frontends, since the TV it was attached to was sold, so I'm down to 4 frontend machines and two backend servers.

[UPDATE 7/15/05]

I have a lot of mp3s. Not a LOT like some people- maybe 1500-2000. I had brought them into mythmusic, but there was a problem. Some of them had good IDv3 tags, others didn't. They also weren't organized very well. I asked around and found a really cool program. MusicBrainz is a site that has an awesome utility for tagging mp3s. It integrates with the F/OSS music database Freedb.org and will identify, tag, and rename audio files based on audio fingerprinting. Regardless of how you name your files, or what IDv3 information is attached to them, chances are, MusicBrainzs can identify it. If it can't, you can manually import a CD from Freedb and submit the fingerprints of your tracks so that the next person who tries to identify those songs will find them. I ran my mp3 collection through the tagger and now everything's nice and clean. While I was cleaning up my mp3s, I decided to go ahead and import the rest of our CD collection into mythmusic. I started with the ripper included in mythmusic, but that proved to be unstable with the frontend box I was using to do the ripping. Eventually, I turned to the also free program Audiograbber which also integrates with Freedb for music tagging. Audiograbber doesn't ship with it, but you'll want to get the windows version of LAME to rip at anything higher than 56kbps bitrate. So between these two programs- MusicBrainz and Audiograbber, you can tame any mp3 / CD collection.