I cannot believe that it took me about 3-4 days of grinding to get my initial MythTV setup running on Gentoo but only 3-4 hours on Knoppix/Debian. I learned a lot from the Gentoo install, but the most important lesson of all was to never do it again. Thanks to everyone involved in making the process SANE!

The only gripe I have (and I'm sure there have been heated discussions about this) is that I believe ext3 is the wrong choice for a filesystem in this usage context. I was having problems with playback suddenly pausing, hard drive light coming on for about 3-5 seconds, and then continuing. Yes hdparm is sufficiently tweaked, yes I tried XvMC, yes I know a lot about tuning kernels. In my case, backing up the /myth partition, reformatting it as XFS and restoring it made this problem go away for me.

Is there a simple answer to why XFS is not default? My milage was improved, but maybe the general public doesn't need it?

I use ReiserFS myself, but it would be nice to be able to choose what type of filesystem you want somewhere during the install process rather than just having ext3 forced upon you.