During the planning phase for this project, I put together a list of requirements that I wanted my final solutions to meet.

• Secure
• Reliable
• Usable (Wife friendly)
• Economical
• Fun
• Most Important: Learn Something!

  Given these requirements, there were a few different ways that I could have went. I could have used Windows Media Center, Windows with a third-party DVR solution, or Linux with a DVR software package. While I did not really consider Windows with a third-party solution, I did consider using Windows Media Center. Media Center would have met nearly all of the requirements that I had for this project, except for the Learning factor and the fact that I would have incurred an extra cost due to having to purchase Media Center. Once I realized all of this, it was time to move on to the next choice....Linux.

  My Linux experience goes back about 5 years, beginning with Red Hat. In addition to Red Hat, I have used Fedora (you might as well say Red hat), a little SUSE, and then I found Gentoo. Once I started using Gentoo, I was hooked. The package management system, Portage, makes installing and updating packages fairly easy. From my experience, it is also faster than other distributions. It is still my distribution of choice. Other distuibutions work equally well, but on this site we will deal entirely with Gentoo.

  Trying to make a choice on which DVR software package to use was a little more involved. I looked at a couple of different packages: MythTV and Freevo. MythTV caught my eye because of its robustness. With Myth, you can have a web interface to administer it, a DVD player, the ability to create a slide show, the ability to backup to dvd, and many other modules. In addition, the project is in active development. I would say the difficulty level of getting this setup and running is direcly proportional to your level of experience with Linux.

Let's move on!