I'm looking for a good solution to do time and location shifting for viewing american network TV overseas.

Bittorrent is no longer an option since NBC seems to have suddenly started getting overzealous about sending out 'cease and desist' letters (at least to me).

iTunes is too expensive for the amount of content desired.

I know I can location-shift with a Slingbox, but will it time-shift as well (ie...a DVR)?

Is this something I can do with MythTV? I know it can time-shift, but how 'bout location shifting either via download or stream?

Thanks for the link, I found this page which seems to have even more useful info. They speak about transcoding to MPEG1...wouldn't MPEG4 be better?

I know next to nothing about streaming video...so humor me if I ask dumb questions.

Yes, MPEG4 would almost definitely be better. It's more CPU intensive to encode and decode than MPEG1 (or 2), but that's probably not your limiting factor here.

I seriously doubt you're going to be able to stream the video. Encoded NTSC is probably going to end up being about 2Mbps, which probably isn't going to stream very well. You could transcode it to smaller resolutions, but I don't think that's going to happen in realtime with the amount of CPU you're going to have available, so you won't be able to stream that, either.

I think your best bet is to have MythTV record the shows, then transcode them to MPEG, then download them. Even better, it might make sense to transcode them to DVD-compliant MPEG2s do that you can just burn them to DVD and watch them on your TV.

I believe he received just the one, but it was for several episodes of 30 Rock (which NBC appears to be tracking). All this is my fault, of course, since I live in the Middle East and can't get decent television over here. I've been utilizing his high-speed connection to download the shows and then transfer them over here. Unfortunately, NBC is getting grumpy about it, so I guess I must cease and desist.

FWIW, 30 Rock is available on NBC's web site.

Well...one is enough, I'm no idiot. But they had an accurate list of several files. They were nice enough to allow me to remove the offending content and notify them rather than slapping me with a lawsuit.

You could do the combination mythtv/TiVo and slingbox. One of my good friends will walk around work here watching tv on his iPAQ streamed from his DirecTiVo at home. It's not an all in one solution though.

It's split up into four parts on their site with each part (I'm assuming here, I only watched the first part) preceded by an unskippable ad. I didn't notice any immediately obvious links that would allow one to save the content for non-browser window offline viewing.

If you have someone in the US that can run a tivo for you;), EtiVo sounds like an option. The website is down now, but EtiVo runs on a hacked tivo and automatically encodes shows into some WMV format for streaming directly from the tivo to a PC. You can also download the files if you would like.

Ah! Thanks Rob. eTiVo looks very interesting. I have a Series 1 TiVo with cachecard that's already been hacked. I'm not currently using it because of the Series 3 upgrade. It's got a year of service left since I moved the lifetime service to my Series 3. Perhaps I can just install that and hang it off my cable connection for him.