More Joy With Windows?

[hard candy]

Intel and Microsoft are teaming up to push "windows Media Joy" (to sell more hardware and software, I'm sure) Microsoft/Intel Digital Joy (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/198097_wintel04.html)

WinXP Media Extender (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediacenter/evaluation/devices/default.mspx)

Can we have this much "joy" with Linux? I know about Linux TV, streaming video,audio, etc. I use a modded Xbox with Xbox Media Center to do this. So I really have not tried setting up a Linux media center.
I was wondering if you folks who have set up media centers could share their experiences. I see questions on the forums and know of the sites, but this inquiring mind wants to know the reality of it.
Can you stream your TV from the living room to the bedroom? Is it really hard to configure the linux drivers? Are you time shifting your TV reality shows ? :) Is it a frustrating experience?

[bwkaz]

This may not be a "media center" thing, but I think it's close. ;)

I'm timeshifting some Star Trek: DS9 reruns. They play at 11 AM and noon, at which time I'm at work. I had a TV card sitting in my machine already, so I hooked it up to the house's feed, and messed around with transcode (and "v4lctl setchannel") until I got it to work.

Dunno about streaming, since I don't do that. I just play it with mplayer, then delete it (good thing, too -- 1 hour of video+audio is like 800 megs...).

Drivers were simple -- this TV card just uses the bttv driver.

There are 2 frustrating things about it. First is the poor signal quality in the coax by the time it gets to my TV card -- this means that at times when the background is pure white, it likes to flicker. This wouldn't be bad, except that when that happens, transcode's compression gets thrown off, and the video records a LOT fewer frames than the audio. This means that the video ends up getting about 10-15 seconds ahead of the audio when I play it back, which gets really distracting.

The second frustrating thing is when my kernel filesystem code (2.6.9 vanilla) decides to oops in the middle of recording, or when the 2.6.9 via-rhine driver decides to break wake-on-lan with my network card. (I use WOL from my server, which is always on, to wake this machine up 15 minutes before the local crontab is supposed to kick off a recording job. ;))