Holy high definition bat eyes! There is a linux driver that works with the MyHD MDP-110 MDP-120 and MDP-130 cards from MIT based on the Teralogic 880 decoder HDTV chip! The source can be found here at http://sourceforge.net/projects/myhd/ You can bet this is the card that I'll use with a Linux server using MythTV. I do have an AMD 2.0 GHZ chip and 512 MB ram with a 120 GB hard disk at my disposal to put this together.

Basically, the design includes a broadband connection via a router so I can run an ethernet cable to the Linux server near the TV. I could use wireless, but I'm not sure of the bandwith requirements for high definition video yet and a wireless connection may not be enough if I store a HD video file on the network and not on the Linux server. The MyHD card does hardware encoding/decoding, and has component outputs to the TV. The card also supports DVI output as an option that I did not take since I don't have a TV with an HDMI connector. S-video, co-ax, and standard RCA inputs are supported by the MyHD card. I'll run an S-video cable from my satellite receiver to the card, and a co-ax cable from a UHF antenna to the card to receive local over the air HD broadcasts.

I'll be able to use MythTV as a front end to schedule recordings of the shows that I like. The commercial skip feature should work well, and I'll be able to burn the TV shows on DVD as well, commercial free. I'm not sure how legal this is, so if it's not legal I won't be able to record the shows. I think it's legal as long as the recordings are not rebroadcast or played for an audience. Any feedback from anyone who knows anything about this would be great.

We'll see how this goes this weekend!

I'm inclined to build a linux based version of TiVo that supports all features of TiVo except for the monthly fee. I'll need a video capture card with linux drivers and a component output. More details to follow soon. I'm inclined to use the MythTV front end available at mythtv.org