TITAM - Technical issues that affected me

As the title says... A little background: My old - actually, ancient - Shuttle-based PVR system decided to more or less give up on me.  It still worked, but the old Shuttle case had a poor habit of overheating.  An easily predictable consequence of the form factor, no doubt, but let's not forget the poor old thing was merrily cranking away recording live TV and playing back edited videos for many, many years. Time to upgrade.  I figured, if a lousy old Shuttle SS54G could handle it, who knows what I could do with a modern Core series processor and an SSD? So I go get a little system built, scavenging the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 150 TV capture cards out of the old Shuttle.  Hell, they're perfectly good, and they're on the BeyondTV compatibility list.  They have hardware encoding and do a fine job.  Anyone who tells you that you need uber-great hardware to code NTSC TV is crazy.  (HD is another story, maybe.) The old system used SageTV, which has ...

My old PVR having given up - and, admittedly, rather behind the times when it came to video formats - it is time for a new one. I heard about Plex on Lifehacker, and it sounded worth a try.  I prefer to keep my PVR (recording) and media center playback software separate right now, so the fact that Plex does not record TV was not an issue. Plus, it's free.  Why not? I have found a few things that I do not like.  Note that I am not criticizing - well, maybe I am, a little - but free software is free, and you can't complain, really, or it wouldn't exist.  This information is here to help other people decide if Plex is right for them. Here's a few things that I have learned so far: 1.  You need a dedicated folder for your media library. Why?  Plex has no "exclude" function.  The developers don't seem to think it worthwhile.  ( "Can you explain why you want this?" is a pretty amazing comment to me.) Given there are a near-infinite numbe...