TiVo, definitely, purely due to the hackability aspect of it.

I have a stand alone tivo. I bought the "20 hour" version (which in actuality is a 6 and a half hour version.. TiVo likes to give the recording time based on the worst-quality encoding bitrate), and already have a 100GB drive on order. Some people have gotten their TiVo's up to about 260 hours (worst quality) encode time, which is insane.

It runs linux. I have ssh running on mine on my LAN. I can grab the MPEG-2 streams from the hard drive onto my PC, and reencode them to whatever format I want (SVCD, VCD, etc) and back up that way.

AFAIK, the DirecTiVo units haven't been hacked in this way yet. You can grab the streams, but since they are basically saving the raw feeds that DTV broadcasts, it is missing some MPEG-2 data that is required by most encoders/players to mess with it. Plus, at least with my SA unit, I at least know that it would be illegal for Tivo to send DirecTV my viewing habits.

Hackability.... if I could install ssh on my coffee maker, I would. :)

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