rocking with mythtv

The parent's TiVo died, after about a week of no DVR, my brother and I found a tv tuner card and a box to take vga to component. This thing rocks! If you buy the right kind of card, you can get xubuntu to just work. Myth front-end auto-starts with the box, if you log out, it will log back in after XXX seconds. You can add a second tuner card fairly easily. Recording priority has an add-subtract priority selector that can do +/- 20 from default.
hdtv tuner has problems searching for channels; and I have yet to find a way to organize the programs so more than one person can choose to get rid of it before a show is deleted. Also, it does take a little while to find some of the options.
Over all, I like it. If space becomes a problem I can set up a render farm, and have each linux box in the house re-encoding an episode, to make that work, you will need to mount your data folder on every computer, this is not officially supported. I can even watch the episodes on my mac since the myth front-end runs on ppc and intel macs.