Turn Your Rig into a Linux Home Theater PC (for free)

Here’s yet another article highlighting 3 HTPC software programs that run under Linux.  The best part is it’s all free.  Well, free if you don’t put a price on your time and you already have the hardware laying around.

ExtremeTech

You hardly need a state of the art machine to run MythTV or Freevo, though some extra processing power and RAM would be beneficial when transcoding media. While hard drive space may be a serious limiting factor if you tend to have a lot of programs highlighted in your TV Guide, any old components you have lying around should be sufficient for your HTPC. Just keep an eye out for a TV tuner card that has a well-established compatibility record. The MythTV developers recommend about 256MB RAM and an 800MHZ processor (1.5GHZ if your tuner card doesn’t have hardware encoding).

For those that are somewhat hesitant to blow away their preciously
tuned Windows partition, there are several LiveCDs mentioned.  These
allow you to try a Linux PVR application without ever changing your
hard drive.

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