I built a MythTV box on the Gentoo Linux distribution. I used a Hauppauge WinTV-GO capture card though I'm very tempted to pick up one their PVR boards for improved image quality and hardware encoding.

The MythTV software has a lot of dependencies which is why I chose to install it on Gentoo. Unfortunately, it has even more hardware dependencies. I used a Biostar motherboard with an AMD AthlonXP 2000+ CPU and 256MB of DDR RAM. I built a custom 2.6.1 kernel on the box and had to shut off APIC to get the NIC to be recognized. The motherboard also did not provide an S-Video TV-Out port so I initially used an old ATI card which did have such a port. However, I quickly learned that ATI's drivers stink so I went out and bought a scan converter instead.

Finally, with the help of a co-worker who knows how to solder, I put together an infrared receiver and fired up LIRC on the server (I had to patch my 2.6.1 kernel to do this.)