Comments | silverleaf_: Damn whippersnappers and their new fangled television

silverleaf_

Damn whippersnappers and their new fangled television

Nov 14, 2007 18:14

Hey everyone,

I am trying to help my fairly technology-illiterate parents find some sort of device which will let them record TV shows onto a HDD and/or DVD and surf the web on their TV, with just one machine ( Read more... )

Comments 8

(The comment has been removed)

silverleaf_ November 18 2007, 19:52:01 UTC

I am not sure that the intent behind the internet fridge was ever that you would stand in front of your fridge and read Wikipedia articles. I got the impression that the fridge just had an interface to various internet shopping services built into it. I really don't see how that isn't useful, except perhaps for the fact that there don't seem to be many decent online shopping services in this country. They all have unreasonable restrictions on times and things.

coffeeman November 14 2007, 23:44:00 UTC

Windows Media Center

*duck*

silverleaf_ November 18 2007, 19:49:00 UTC

*throws chair*

It looks like I will probably end up going down that sort of path, actually. There doesn't seem to exist anything that isn't a PC which will do what they want. Whether I'll use something like WMC or hack together something free I don't yet know.

Congrats on your promotion.

coffeeman November 18 2007, 23:15:09 UTC

Thanks!

I think I have a friend who may or may not have done something of the sort on Linux too, so I'll see if I can send him your way.

silverleaf_ November 20 2007, 07:31:09 UTC

Thanks, I appreciate that.

pecosdave November 19 2007, 00:29:57 UTC

Coffeeman recommended I drop by. Here's my MythTV tag. Being in Austrailia may complicate listings gathering, but MythTV itself is awesome ( ... )

silverleaf_ November 20 2007, 07:36:27 UTC

Thanks for dropping by, and so promptly, I appreciate it. Sorry for my less-than-stellar response time.

MythTV sounds like it would definitely be the way to go if I ended up taking the free path. It was something I intended to look into, since I've heard people sing its praises on Slashdot and the like, but never quite got around to it.

I am indeed a BSD guy, but would probably just use Linux in this situation because my folks would never know the difference and because I don't harbour any delusions about the relative well-supportedness of Linux vs BSD. Debian is one of the few Linux distros that don't induce vomiting in me these days (unless it's changed a lot since I last used it, which was shortly after Sarge came out, if I recall), so knowing that MythTV will play nicely with it is reassuring.

If you'd like, I'll let you know if I end up going down this route.

pecosdave November 22 2007, 07:42:19 UTC

Debian is still great. A friend talked me into Ubuntu on my laptop, it's got issues, Ubuntu induced, I've tried many distro's over the years and Debians the only one I can stick with. I was on SuSE for a long time, but the reason I stayed on it is to long of a story for this reply ( ... )