I was also doing this for some time and finally took the plunge and built my own using a free package that you run under Linux called MythTV
www.mythtv.org Now if your computer minded this is very simple
Check out some of pictures
Above is my actual PC with a Hauppauge 350 Tuner card (
www.hauppauge.com), which I am using for video capture, and using its TV out port to hook into my TV.
The case works. I love it.. Now there are better ones out there but run about $300+ just for the case and no PS, this one was $160 with PS or so
There is also smaller cases that work good as well.
My backend server (where I record all shows, watch shows from etc) is a PIII 800 with 8 x 120 gig harddrives (in a Raid 5) I have about 500 gig alloted to my PVR setup. I can record over the network via NFS to this file server with no problems or hiccups. I even play stuff recorded to my main mythfrontend. Eventually I will have more MythFrontends (with capture cards) and they will all share the file server so you can be on any of them and still see all recorded shows. Also the more capture cards you have MythTV will know about them and schedual recordings so you can recard as many shows at once as you have capture cards, even do PIP.
I am getting a DVD burner for my main PC so I can record what I want to the DVD (as well as cut out all commercials) The MythTV also does commercial flagging ( now its not perfect) so when your watching you can adjust the start and end of a commercial and when you transcode, the commercials will be removed.
I could go on..
I am using a PII333 as the PVR350 card does encoding and decoding of the Mpeg stream on the card. If you were to use a TV Out video card you would need a faster machine as decoding will be done via software and encoding will be done on the capture board you are using.
I love this free PVR Software, it has so much potential. If anyone in Calgary wants help setting one up I will do it for frags <grin>
If you have questions drop me a private here.
Jim[/url]