Well, I am now closing in on a working MythTV installation (I hope), although a few problems remain. The quality of video coming from this old Brooktree 878 card is terrible, and as yet I haven’t been able to get sound working reliably. Besides prebuffering incorrectly, something having to do with the mixer is wonky: you’d think with all the experience I have with recording my podcasts, I’d be able to figure it out, but so far it has eluded me.

In the end I don’t really want to use the Brooktree card at all: a couple of days ago I found a pretty good deal on the WinTV PVR 150 cards, which do hardware MPEG2 compression for $63 via Amazon. It should ship next week, and hopefully this will provide better quality. Hopefully. If I get this working acceptably well, I’d probably like to shift the entire thing into a smaller, quieter box. Or maybe I could just find a quieter fan, or throttle this one back. Oh well, I’ve got to stop tinkering with this.

I’m off to Radio Shack to pick up a second microphone for my next podcast: stay tuned! A special guest will be joining me for a change of pace. I hope you all will like it.