I happened across the Telematics Freedom Foundation PDF on FLOSS Media Centers, and the chart in the middle was great! For as little as we watch TV, the cable TV bill is gigantic! So we're considering ditching it (keeping the cable modem of course, but that portion of the bill doesn't feel as outrageous unless you compare it to most of the rest of the developed world where the US loses on bandwidth to households and price per bandwidth), but we like the DVR feature. So we need to replace it with something like TiVo. From the chart, I eliminated Neuros (don't want another set-top box, although it does look cool) and MediaPortal (I don't run servers on Windows). The next filter was that I want to watch and record TV, so that knocked out all but MythTV and Freevo. (Shame; XBMC and its derivatives Plex and Boxee look nice.) Those two have about the same feature sets, but I noticed that Feevo didn't have keyword search in media library; if I go to the trouble of adding keywords (and I do), I want to be able to search those. So it's MythTV.
The easy path is probably one of the bundled versions. Of those, Google search results seem to agree that if you can stand the longer up-front install time, MythDora is the easiest. I shouldn't have to install it too often, and I don't mind walking away from an installer either, so I think I should burn a copy of MythDora to try it out. Bonus is using RHEL at work might transfer to some comfort with RH's Fedora Core too (I hope). I'm keeping LinuxMCE in mind too, in case we want to add that home automation. Since LinuxMCE uses MythTV as well, I don't think it would be a painful transition for us after I install the same libraries and skins, but I suspect that starting there would be unnecessarily complicated.
Finding the right online reference comparing our choices has made all the difference so far. Yay for online!
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