Well, now that the Ubuntu 8.04 and derivatives are officially released I must say job well done. I installed Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Mythbuntu and they are pretty good as usual. Thing is, I switched to Mandriva Spring 2008 at work and at home and life has been better!

Just a quick list of sites and software I use to watch on-line television. I setup a HDHomeRun tuner via cable antenna, setup EyeTV 3 on my wife's Mac, and use TitanTV as the guide and remote recorder. Awesome!  Setup was nothing. Waiting for my Windows Vista MCE machine so I can get is setup and installed. I will do a compare between it and OS X, plus the others, once I get things rolling and maybe even post some setup guides. Hoping I can get a cable card for the encrypted channels. I read that the first card is free from WOW.

Let me just say, MediaPortal and Sesam are a nightmare! MythTV almost worked, but lost my settings for no reason! Seems to be a common Linux issue, at least in my experience... It really didn't well enough for me to keep anyway. So, we will see how Vista MCE does with the HDHomeRun. Either way, I watch a lot of content directly off the web saving me hard drive space and this list will should get you started. My personal favs that look really good on my LG 42" are Hulu, Joost, and Netflix. Clickstar and Blip.TV are not totally ready yet, but they look good.

Building a MythTV Linux Media PC. I looked at Knoppmyth and Mythdora , but I really liked Mythbuntu the best. So I am going to build a Home Media/Theater Computer! Here is what I plan to use as hardware...

Other Open Source Media Center software...

Windows  -  MediaPortal

Windows -  SesamTV

Mac OS X - CenterStage 

Linux - LinuxMCE   (this manages everything in your home from heating and cooling, to watering the yard, to watching movies! Requires Kubuntu 7.10 OS )

Mac, Linux, and Windows - Freevo

Mac, Linux, Windows, XBox -XBMC

Official MythTV web-site 

I used to use Crossover for the few Windows applications that I still use, like Photoshop and Flash. Lately I found that Wine runs these applications better than Crossover Office and for free to boot! Crossover Office is a commercial product. In the course of looking up some Wine related items I found a little application named Wine-doors .