I've been using a S1 UK Tivo for many years now and apart from the lack of HD, I'm generally happy with how it works. Whenever my family come to visit they're able to use it and know what to do. This even includes my mum who is generally terrible with technology.

The problem is that Tivo never really got that popular here as they stopped selling the UK units not that long after they were introduced. They continued to provide the subscription data for users however.

Tivo recently entered in a partnership with a cable TV company here and they're launching a new cable Tivo but its exclusive to the cable service and I use satellite. I'm unable to get cable as they don't offer it in my area. They recently announced that they're going to completely discontinue the S1 UK Tivo support and no longer provide guide data.

This brings me now to the problem of what do I replace the Tivo with? There are some murmurings of people generating their own guide data slices to insert into the Tivo database but nothing has actually happened yet. Most of the functionality of the Tivo relies on heavy preprocessing of the data as well so I'm unsure how well things like Season Passes would work.

The options I've considered so far are:

1. Look into the alternative guide data and see how well it works.

2. Give up on the Tivo completely and build a box for MythTV or Windows MCE.

3. Give up on the Tivo completely and get the Sky+ PVR that the satellite provider offers. The downside to this is that even with the latest boxes and firmware, I still hear complaints about how its flakey.

4. Give up on the Tivo and get another PVR box but ones that have a video input seem to be fairly scarce. They majority of them are Freeview FTA based it seems?

f you build your own you have the option to capture HD from component video connections if that interests you. So long as you use a program that' compatible with the HDPVR from Hauppague of course.

Other software options include:

SageTV
MediaPortal

As I've noted in another thread around here, hardware for a home-brew PVR is pretty simple these days. An Ion2 "nettop" (eg. Zotac HD-ID11), plus a 1GB RAM stick, plus a 2.5" notebook style hard disk, and you're almost there for about $250 or so.

Add a $10 remote control w/receiver (DX), and then think about a capture device. As Bruno points out, the HD-PVR USB box can capture high-quality video from the component output of a sat receiver, and pretty much any USB DVB-T/DVB-S device ($50-$100) can capture from composite (and sometimes svideo) outputs.

SageTV, MythTV, GB-PVR, MS MCE, etc.. provide the software. The challenge is to pick one that also has a way to get the EPG ("program guide") data for your specific sat provider.

Cheers

Hauppauge actually have a PCIe version of the HDPVR now. At least I recall reading about it a little while back.

If you're going to capture HD video, you'll also need a lot of disk space - at least until you transcode your captures. I'd probably go for some other barebones system rather than using a nettop for the server. If a client system is desired, then that's suitable for such a system. Something that you can cram at least 2TB into.