I've had a MythTV setup for about a year and a half now. I originally installed MythTV on Ubuntu 6.10, and had a fair amount of difficulty getting it set up to work properly. I am happy to say that Ubuntu has improved, and more importantly, the Mythbuntu project has created some nice tools for integrating the two creating a nice Linux distribution.

My current box is an old-ish Compaq 'Gaming' PC that I bought from woot. It's got a ~2 Ghz AMD cpu in it, and 2 GB of RAM. I've added 5 500 GB disks using two Promise SATA (The TX-4 Cards) cards, yielding ~2 TB of storage for MythTV.

I'm using Linux md devices to create a RAID-5 set with the TX-4 cards. I compared these to 'hardware' raid at work, and found that they perform pretty well, especially considering I'm only a single user. I had a fair amount of difficulty getting this working properly under Ubuntu 6.10 due to various problems. One BIG thing is to make sure you set the partition type to '0xfd', something I didn't know until recently. With this, running 'mdadm -As' will automatically find and create the raid.

But, anyways, what I have is generally overkill. The other day, i priced out a machine that'd make a nice MythTV box for around $400. This would only include a 300 GB drive, but that's sufficient for most people. The Hauppauge cards work really well with MythTV, and with them, the encoding is handled via an on-board MPEG-2 encoder, which means your CPU isn't handling the encoding, only the decoding.

I really like MythTV. I've never had a Tivo, and the 'recommendation' feature would be nice sometimes. But, I like the flexibility that MythTV gives me. There's a great movie feature that any movie put into a directory will be played by mplayer - making it really easy to watch movies.

If you haven't, check MythTV out.