Now that TiVo has sold out its customers to the entertainment industry (your TiVo will auto-delete your stored programs if the rightsholder wants to, despite the fact that there is no legal right under copyright to limit home recordings' shelf-lives), you should be looking for an alternative PVR.
The field is rich. TiVo and a few other mainstream PVR vendors have dominated the market while simultaneously eschewing features that upset Hollywood executives like Larry Kenswil, the Universal exec who said "Fair use is the last refuge of the scoundrel" and Turner Broadcasting's Jamie Kellner who called commercial-skipping theft and promised only "a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom."
Competing, but less-known products have a stupendous array of features that TiVo users have only dreamt of. One such is the Interact TV. Their flagship TeraTelly is a Linux-based PVR that holds 1.2 terabytes' worth of ripped DVDs, CDs, downloadable Internet videos, digital photos and recorded programs. Anything on your TeraTelly can be moved to your computer, and you can program your TeraTelly from work via a web-browser.
TeraTelly is expensive (though the company has other, cheaper products). There's still lots of room for low-end PVRs that do all of this with slightly less storage, cutting costs to those comparable with commodity PVRs like TiVo's. Looking to fund a cool business-plan? Look for someone building and selling one of these for $400.
(Thanks, Kieth!)
Update: Jesse Jack sez, "So for your users who would prefer to run their media center off
of Windows, I would highly recommend the free-as-in-beer (I
don't know what license they use, though) Media Portal from
mediaportal.sourceforge.net. It is still beta but I've found it
to be very stable in its current version (at least for US cable
standards) and has great features beyond just PVR (jukebox,
internet browsing, LCD support, AM/FM radio cards, shout-
cast, etc.)"
Update 2: Eirikso has a great roundup of PC-based PVRs you can play with at home.
Update 3: Stephen sez: "One word, SageTV. I built a SageTV box two and a half years ago and it has been running flawlessly ever since. It beat the hell out of TiVo then and it still does. It records with no DRM, has full network connectivity, automatc listings, automatic series recording, mp3 and ripped DVD play, multiple tuners, trainable IR recieve/transmit. I watch recordings on my gameboy play-yan and PSP whenever I want, burn DVDs etc.
"Once the system is setup, it just works. A single licence is $69 and they have great package deals on tuners and IR dongles. A pre-assembled box is available from VMB."
