Do it yourself TiVo
 

My son just turned his PC into a digital TV recorder with MythTV
http://www.mythtv.org/ Runs on Linux and of course you need a TV card and acres of disk space but it is networkable, can be programmed from any PC on the net and uses your local paper's TV listing rather than a pay service.

Radeon's All in Wonder video cards also come with the software/hardware to do this.

awesome.. too bad i havent learned how to use linux yet. haha

sounds sweeet, i have timewarners new digital box with built in tivo style hd love it

I have spent way too much time doing this. I am running a program called snapstream. www.snapstream.net. I find it very useful. I can ever watch recorded shows on any pc on my lan.

I just record TV with a simple tv tuner, and then stream it over LAN...

Arrow,

Yup, this is basically what I do. Snapstream just bolts a little easy interface to this for the family to cope with. It will also recompress at night, and some other little tools that were worth the few bucks.

What I do likeis when it records a show, it stores an ID tag, like MP3s with show info, etc.

sounds like your system is a bit more in depth than mine...
ill check snapstream out

every time I have tried to do something like this the video files created are huge! And for some reason when i try to use compression i seem to lose some of the video/audio... maybe its because i need a better computer :\

I am a bit of a Home Theatre Junkie. One of my new projects I have been doing is turning my pocket PC into a TCP/IP network remote. Good thing is, unlike normal remote controls, this is bidirectional, so my CD/MP3 album covers are on the remote, and I can browse in my hand, and control my main amps. Same applies to DVD chapter lists etc.

Check out this.... PRISMIQ

i'd love to do it myself... but i don't have the time to peak and tweak... i'm lame, i just use a tivo...

The only problem i have is that the pc is dedicated for video recording. I have a dual tuner tivo and with 2 kids it is constantly recording shows. I would never be able to use the pc for anything and at that point I believe the Tivo is cheaper and easier. On the other hand, having a dvd-r in your system would allow you to archive shows which would be great (something I can't do easily with my current tivo).

I have a LeadTek tv2000xp deluxe tuner card, and have been dabling with linux a bit, I may decide to give this a try if I ever get around to install Linux on my desktop system

I'd like to put in another vote for Snapstream. I've been using it for about 2 years now (before they even had the pretty interface) and I've found its an excellent program. I like the fact that I can record in Windows Media to keep the file sizes down (I know, Microsoft is evil, blah blah) so I can keep alot of programs on my 60GB disk. The cool thing about Snapstream is that they are always working on improving the software, like the fact they just added hardware encoder support, although I've been pretty happy with the Software encoder. I dont have any problems using my Athlon XP 1600+ while it records things in Windows Media, although I should get around to dedicating a machine to this and putting it in my living room.