Because it’ll “change your life”

Over the course of the last several months I have been told my no less than three separate people who had no knowledge of, or relationship to, each other that "TiVO will change your life." Exact words. From three separate people. When that happens, you pretty much have to take whatever is being said seriously.

As I mentioned earlier, I watch a lot of TV and I also get held up at work with disturbing frequency which makes following shows in the 8 PM time slot a perilous proposition. With my TV-watching street cred and my technophile status in full effect, I honestly felt like a bit of a Luddite for not having jumped on the TiVO bandwagon earlier. However, as cute as TiVO is, I knew that it just wasn't going to cut it. I've got movies and music sitting on another PC that I want to play, I didn't want to record TV on one machine and use a separate one to watch DVDs, I wanted to be able to schedule recording remotely (which you can do with TiVO now, but you have to go through Yahoo! and it looks pretty woefully under-featured), etc. I've built my own PCs pretty much forever, so I *knew* that I needed not just a TiVO but a full-fledged HTPC. A tiny god, if you will, in front of which lesser machines tremble in fear.

I've been spec'ing parts, reading reviews, and planning this out for the last few months and, with the aid of a recent bonus, I overcame my legendary cheapness and finally bought the parts. The plan is to install Gentoo and MythTV: you see, I need something that I can heavily customize and integrate into my existing network. I'm a control freak about shit like this and I care very little about something working right out of the box. Hell, the endless parade of tweaks and customizations is half the fun for me. The parts list along with where things were purchased is below for those interested. Once everything arrives late next week, I'll be sure to keep you all up to date as I build and configure things.

• Case: Ahanix D5
• CPU: Athlon64 3200+ with Zalman 7000B Fan
• Motherboard: Asus K8V-X SE
• Memory: 1 GB (2x 512 MB) Corsair PC3200
• DVD Drive: Asus 16x DVD-ROM
• Video Card: Asus N6600 128 MB
• TV Capture Cards: 2x FusionHDTV5 RT Lite
• Sound Card: Chaintech AV-710
• Remote: Kameleon URC-9960
• Hard Drive: 40 GB Western Digital I have lying around (shows will actually be stored on a file server on my network, so this is just for the OS and as a temporary dumping ground for recordings)