Have you been itching to get your hands on a Media Center computer that lets you record all of your shows? Both Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate include these capabilities, but you can download Mythbuntu if you’re looking for an open source alternative to put an extra PC to work.
As the name implies, Mythbuntu is based on the ever-popular Ubuntu Linux operating system. It makes it extremely easy to setup MythTV so that you can quickly begin recording your favorite shows. Here are some of the features you’ll get with Mythbuntu/MythTV:
- Basic ’live-tv’ functionality. Pause/Fast Forward/Rewind "live" TV.
- Support for multiple tuner cards and multiple simultaneous recordings.
- Distributed architecture allowing multiple recording machines and multiple playback machines on the same network, completely transparent to the user.
- Completely automatic commercial detection/skipping
- Grabs program information using xmltv.
- Displays basic program information on channel change using a themeable semi-transparent on-screen display.
- Electronic Program Guide that lets you change channels and select programs to record.
- Scheduled recordings of TV programs, and playback and deletion of those programs, all through a themeable UI.
- A nice web interface to let you select programs to record remotely.
- Rip, categorize, play, and visualize MP3/Ogg/FLAC/CD Audio files. (FLAC, Vorbis, and MP3 encoding). Create complex playlists (and playlists containing playlists) through a simple UI.
- An emulator frontend. (MAME, NES, SNES, generic PC games)
- An image viewer/slideshow application.
- A weather module.
- A generic video player module, with automatic metadata lookups
- A DVD player / ripper module. Make perfect backups, or transcode down to smaller file sizes.
- An RSS news feed reader module.
MythTV is also well known for the selection of plugins that are available, as well as some themes. With nearly 300,000 downloads it’s looking like the MythTV project is doing pretty well for itself.
Even though MythTV is stable for you to use, Mythbuntu is still in the Alpha stage so you have to be willing to cope with some bugs and known issues. I’m sure it will continue to get better as future versions are released, and I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful thing!
Although lazy people will probably buy a pre-configured MythTV computer. 
If you want some screenshots of Mythbuntu you can visit this page, or screenshots of MythTV can be found here.
Source: Download Squad
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Tags: Pre-Release, Software, Linux, Ubuntu
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I have to take a moment to point out LinuxMCE http://linuxmce.com/ . It’s also based on Ubuntu, but it is a complete media center, with what sounds to be more control than Mythbuntu.
Mythbuntu also looks like it’s worth checking out. I’m excited to hear about a new option!
LinuxMCE is no doubt awesome, but MythTV handles itself more like a true Media Center or digital video recorder would. Anyone switching, for example, from TiVo would more than likely find themselves familiar with how MythTV handles itself compared to LinuxMCE. But LinuxMCE does offer more features.