But I live in the UK where they stopped selling tivos about 18 months ago so I live in fear that mine will stop working one day and I won’t be able to replace it. There just don’t seem to be any reasonably alternatives. There is sky+ but it’s just not as good in any way as well as being a closed system.

I’ve tried various experiments with home built tivo equivilents with only some success. I figure that for about 5 times the cost of a real tivo I can have a bigger, noiser box that works nearly as well without the quality of the TV guide tivo provide, and generally not quite as good software that’s as nicely integrated into a consumer item rather than a computer.

I did have some sucess with mythtv though but it never worked really well.

It did however work very nicely over a 100Mbit LAN connection, using on average about 1.6Mb a second continuously.

On the video capture card front, you cant go wrong with a hauppage. They usually have the internal mixer connected so you can sample sound directly off of the card without using the sound card passthrough cable. Alternatively you could pick up a cheap ati tv wonder ve for about 40$.