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I have seen a little bit about myth being client/server but didnt know too much more then just that.. so its actually designed to be run on 2 differnt machines?

The client/server part of Myth is not the easiest thing to understand until you start to use it, but it is totally awesome and really worth taking advantage of. In MythTV terminology, the client is called a 'frontend' and the server is called a 'backend'.

A backend is the part that has the tuners and inputs attached to it. It receives the TV signal, schedules recordings and does the encoding.

A frontend is the GUI part. It has the menus that you can flick through, watch TV, watch recordings and schedule recordings here.

You can have the frontend and backend on the same machine of course, or seperate them over a network.

At home my backend is a quiet PC which is hidden away that has some TV tuners in there. I have a frontend on my Macbook, my sister has one on her iBook, there is one on the modified Xbox. We can all watch TV/recordings at the same time if we liked (at the limit of 2 tuners). There is even a frontend called WinMyth for Windows but I could never get it to work. There is a very nice web interface which is classed as a frontend that can be used for scheduling recordings too.

All very exciting. Just to make things a bit more complicated, you can link together multiple backends as well, so they share the channels they have to offer and recordings too. I could link my Myth backend with my friend in the US and he could watch UK TV and I could watch US TV if we had enough bandwidth!

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Am I going to have more lag between channel changes then the tivo with myth? I expect some just hope its not ridiculous..

I don't have a Tivo so can't compare, but there is enough lag watching UK SD DVB-T TV over WiFi to my MacBook to stop me from flicking between channels like I would on my set top box (maybe its a good thing?). I'd say its about 3 seconds to change channel. My backend is an AMD Sempron 2600+ w/1GB RAM and 2x Terratec Cinergy 1400 DVB-T PCI TV Tuners (I'm fairly sure they do MPEG encoding too) running MythTV 0.20. Its a bit faster to switch over on the Xbox which is connected on the LAN, about 2 seconds or so.
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Hussein