Trials and tribulations of building a homebrew PVR

Some years ago I put together a PC that was specifically going to be used as a home theater PC. This was probably a little ahead of its time, but nonetheless wanted to give it a try. I made the disasterous mistake of purchasing an ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder TV tuner card. This card seemed to have everything I wanted. It included a TV tuner, at the time a reasonably high performance video card, and TV output. All seemed seemed well until I tried to use the ATI provided drivers and TV applications. What a joke. The system would lock up regularly, the applications only worked some of the time, and I later learned the drivers for this card are as buggy as the other ATI drivers. Even their Catalyst series of drivers appears to be full of problems.

So after struggling with this machine not making much of a PVR, I decided to try a linux based solution thinking that might be a better approach than using Windoze. There are some great packages out there for linux based PVRs including MythTV and Freevo. They provide many of the capabilities of TiVo, yet require no monthly fee and the ability to add many other features such as News, Weather, SNES emulation, web browsing, easy sharing of recorded programs, etc. But again I'm stuck with this dog of a TV tuner card. Apparently ATI won't share enough information about the Radeon All-in-Wonder card to allow good linux drivers to be written for it. So maybe this card is headed for the parts bin.

Frustrated but still plugging away...