I love my Myth and wouldn't have it any other way, but if you want it to "just work," be sure to do comparison shopping against whatever the dish provider would supply you with ... and remember to put some value on your time.
My 2 cents is that if you are looking at HD, it's hard to justify the cost of the hardware to run Myth (or any homegrown-ish app, IMHO.) Once I got about halfway to the cost of a Tivo and could barely eke out one channel of HD, I scrapped my Myth plans.
However, my testing with cheaper, non HD tuners went off without a hitch. I had a leftover case and CPU sitting around and Myth performed very well with lower bandwidth requirements. The interface is pretty slick, pretty easy to set up if you don't have to tweek anything (but you will), it does a lot of stuff, not limited to just PVR. I'd recommend starting out with KnoppMyth and growing your system from there.
I'm not sure how/why you're limited to non PVR's for your apartment-wide Dish installation, but if you haven't already you might try calling Dish directly to see if they can hook you up. At least confirm that it's a technical issue and not just a thing where the apartment managment doesn't want to deal with it. It seems odd that a regular tuner would be fine, but a PVR would not. Once the stream gets to you it seems like you should be able to do anything you want with it. They may be interested at gaining a loyal customer when said customer moves out of the apartment and has some decisions to make about their programming provider.
-Matt -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
