HDTV will be the death of me

Building, setting up, and actually getting my home-brewed media center to work has been a pretty ridiculous amount of work.

Since I couldn’t get Windows Media Center Edition to actually install on my computer, I bought and have been using SageTV, and so far it’s been working pretty well.

The problem is that, for some reason, it’s the only application that won’t correctly play HDTV. It’s eons slower than the other two programs I have that can view HDTV.

One of the other programs that works with HDTV is BeyondTV, basically a porgram that does what SageTV does, but that I originally tossed out because their Program Guide was buggy as hell (there’s no point in having a program that records shows if it doesn’t know when the shows you want to record are being broadcast). But it does play HDTV.

Sage has a perfectly working program guide, but doesn’t really work with HDTV (crashes and runs slow).

So unless the SageTV support crew can fix the problem, I should probably either return the $100 HDTV card (which I don’t want to do because I want to have HDTV) or get the BeyondTV program guide working and shell out the $100 for that program, or get Windows MCE installed properly (which probably involves completely reformatting my hard drive and starting over and i don’t have the discs down here for that), or find another program I didn’t know about before.

No matter what it’s going to be a pain in the ass.

EDIT: Apparently I was wrong about my limited options. A simple Wikipedia search led me to the following options to explore:

GB-PVR
Media Portal
Got All Media
Show Shifter
Yahoo! Go TV

Or, if I want to install Linux,
MythTV

Now I need to figure out which ones sport HDTV capabilities.