MythTV / TIVO
I like TV, I hate watching crap, TIVO sounds like a GREAT idea. So I set out to build my own.
After looking around I found that Freevo and MythTV are the only real contenders for what I wanted to do. After playing with both I went with MythTV because the interface just feels better.
My MythTV box consists of a Asus KT266 with an Athlon XP 2100+ and a half gig of RAM. It currently has 3 120gig drives for storage. I have three TV tuner cards although I can only use 2 at a time. Oh, and I'm a Debian linux guy.
While I can't say the software doesn't have any glitches, I've had very few problems, this isn't exactly ready for Joe Blow yet at version 0.14. I encode at 480*480 and get pretty good video @ 400MB/hr, I was incoding at 640x480 @ ~800MB/hour which looked flawless, but 300 hours of video sounds like more video than it is when you don't delete stuff.
Honestly I still might get a TIVO or Replay TV if they come down in price enough just for watching TV on my real TV(pausing and rewinding TV ROCKS!!), but if you want to grab and archive shows for long periods, MythTV kicks butt. It also makes a great media computer thingy, a couple more revisions and hopefully it will be stable enough to make an idiot proof setup for it.
I haven't played with any of the software for windows for doing this (TIVO and RePlay TV also uses Linux) so some of that stuff may work well. A coworker tried WinDVR but never got it working, and then got MythTV working nicely in one night. The EyeTV thing for MacOS looks pretty nice to.
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