all you really need is a means of saving video and playing
it back which can be done with an inexpensive PC with a
half-terrabyte storage drive and a tuner card. The more
resolution, the larger the file. I find it amazing folks
are paying a monthly fee for a Tivo type device or DVR
cable service when that is not needed.

Only if the PC has all the programming capability that a cable company
DV-R has for setting schedules. I don't know if they do or not yet.
Nice to know that even if I'm away my series recordings will start
without me intervening, even season to season.

I have two Hauppauge HVR-1600 tuner cards, and a Hauppauge HVR-2250 dual
tuner card in my computer. My 1600's are connected to an outdoor antenna
to pick up over-the-air broadcasts (HD and SD), and my 2250 is connected
to my cable company to pick up free QAM channels (unencrypted channels
accessable without a cable box, mostly local broadcasts and a couple of
extras like Discovery channel). If I had enough slots available, I would
use two HVR-2250's, but right now I have more PCI slots than PCI-e slots.

I have a 1 terabyte hard drive I dedicate solely to video, though I'm
currently using less than half that space despite dozens of music videos,
home movies, and over a months worth of HD TV recordings. This leaves me
plenty of working room for editing home movies and whatnot.

I use the excellent free software "GBPVR" to schedule and record my TV
shows, with a $20/yr subscription to "Schedules Direct" TV listings. This
allows me to schedule recordings up to two weeks in advance, as well as
automatically recording repeating series episodes or other recurring
shows.

Then I use Comskip and VideoRedo to automatically locate and remove
commercials from my TV recordings.

We use a Tvix M-6600 media player to stream my recorded shows from the
computer, over our home network, to our TV in the living room. I only
have the one media player, but I could easily hook up other media players
to watch shows in other rooms if I wished.

Surprisingly, this all has minimal impact on my computer resources. I
can easily record 4 HD shows at once, while streaming a prerecorded show
to the media player in our living room, while my wife plays Farmville on
Facebook.

Of course, this means my computer runs 24/7, but it's usually running
other tasks like defragging drives, or processing other files anyway, so
that's not an issue.

Admittedly, there's a bit of a learning curve and tweaking to get
everything setup properly. But being able to record four shows at once,
while watching a fifth, and no subscription fees makes it more than worth
it. True, we're basically limited to the major broadcast networks, but
I'm not interested in paying for the extra cable channels anyway.
Combine our TV recordings with a couple of movies from Netflix each week,
and streaming Netflix movies through my BluRay player, and we have WAY
more shows to watch than we have time for.

Oh, and for those rare shows on a channel you can't get, you can usually
find them online or as a torrent download.

Anthony