[mythtv-users] Been Gone a While: What happened to the Mac Back-end?

[Ivan Kowalenko]

Evening (to those of you in the Western Hemisphere, Afternoon and  
Morning to the rest of you).

I've been off the MythTV habit for a while (though I suppose that's  
about as bad as saying I've kicked that nasty Oxygen addition), and  
I've wound up with a few changes.

Backstory:
I've (historically) used MythTV with Comcast analog cable. Since 2006  
I've been going to school in New Jersey, so I've just left my MythTV  
system with my aunt and uncle who live near by, and who I've moved in  
with for financial reasons. They have recently switched from Comcast  
analog cable to Verizon FiOS. We've also had the Digital Transition  
here in the US. I've purchased a WinTV HVR-950Q to use with my MacBook  
Pro during my internship (I had to stay somewhere without a TV, and  
I'm a radio/TV/film student: thought it might be nice to record the  
work I was doing off the air).

Current Issues:
I can't find my MythTV back-end. It wasn't anything special, just a  
Celeron 600 with a PVR-150, but it was my go-to machine. Now I find  
myself without a server. I have an old Pentium II I used to use as a  
file server/firewall/router, but I don't think that would have nearly  
enough RAM to handle the back-end software. I've got a friend who has  
managed to get his hand on an old PowerMac G3. It sounds like it'll do  
the job for me, since all I want is a back-end.

I've read that since (I don't know when) the Mac OS X back-end only  
supports two different capture methods, and I happen to own neither of  
them. Is there an older version I can run which would work with the  
HVR-950Q? Or would it be possible to throw Linux on that thing and  
install a copy of MythTV on it (in PowerPC) that can capture from the  
HVR-950Q?

Or am I just generally screwed on this, and should start looking at  
cheap PCs? I really don't care about power on the back-end: it's all  
about economy. I'm trying to make do with what I've got now. My MBP  
can handle all the playback needs I have (I am the only user of the  
system), and I'm willing to settle for just using MythPretty on the  
files and playing them back over the network in VLC if I have to.

Also, just out of curiosity, why was support for pretty much every  
capture card dropped in MythTV OS X?