Not that this comes as any surprise but the skipper can be hacked back to health but then I'd have to kill you if I told you how. Goll-darn-frikkin-frakkin NDA's.

FWIW, I couldn't really find the PVR solution I was looking for (commercially) so I built me own Uber-PVR from plans off the internet. If you have some Linux experience, a masochistic streak and want the holy grail of media servers, check out mythtv.org.

If you don't, stop reading right now. If you do, go get a hammer and whack your left thumb really, really hard. Twice. If your eyes roll back in your head and you moan to yourself "oooohh, that's how I like it", you may keep reading.

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Runs just dandy on <1000 MHz hardware, 128MB ram, GeForce4 MX440 or better video, as much storage as you can lay your hands on (80 Gig will do fine to start) and Hauppauge 250/350 HW tuner/encoder cards. Also works with a couple of SW capture/tuner cards but they eat CPU like crazy. There are some ATSC cards now working with it and there are all kinds of contributed code to control outboard tuners (DISH, cable boxes, C-band, you name it) over RS-232, USB and of course, IR stick-ums. About 2GB/hr at full MPEG-2 for regular def, ~12GB/hr at HD. About 300-600 USD depending on your pile of spare parts laying around.

Other features:
Every feature TIVO has to offer and as many tuners, s-vid and composite inputs you can throw at it
Automatic commercial detection and flagging
Transcoding the edited recording to same or lower bitrates (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, Xvid)
DVD player, ripper and server with IMDB lookups/posters
Video player (.wma, .avi, .mpeg, etc, Xvid, DiVX)
Audio player, ripper, server (MP3, .wav, Ogg, more with lookups)
Photo gallery (.jpg, .bmp, others)
SID telephone/videophone
Weather Module (current, today's and ext forecast, animated radar)
Web browser - RSS feed reader - Web-based administration
Recipe module for the chef with internet lookups
Game emulator (MAME/arcade, NES, SNES, PS1 ... bring your own ROMS)
Client/server (frontend/backend, multiple frontends+backend, master/slave backends, even hack an X-Box as a frontend)
Completely themeable - even the OSD
Incredibly intelligent record scheduling across all sources
Waaaayyy too much more to list here

WARNING: For personal use only! If you try to sell one of these to a customer, that would make you a sadist. If you want to build one for yourself, I strongly suggest you read, read, read and then lurk on the maillists, IRC and other resource sites. The developers have a nasty bite and have absolutely no interest whatsoever in talking to manufacturers. They are open source software zealots.

Sorry for the longass off-topic post.