Something I forgot about is using a PC as a DVR. The three main options are MythTV (Linux), Windows Media Center Edition (Vista), and EyeTV (OS X).
First up to bat is MythTV. Absolutely great solution, supports multiple tuners and clear QAM recording. Only down side, very tedious to setup, all HD tuner cards are internal (wouldn’t work with a Mac Mini), and no cable card support (if you care).
Next up is Windows Media Center Edition. If you want cable card support and HD recording, you have to buy the external tuner bundled with a prebuilt and certified Vista PC with a BIOS flag enabled (DRM sucks). No clear QAM support. External tuner is only a single tuner, so no multiple recordings at once.
Finally we have EyeTV, a software solution for OS X. You can buy two external USB 2.0 tuners and do multiple recordings at once. EyeTV doesn’t fully support multiple tuners, but it is suppose to work fairly well. Main downside: according to an email response I received from them, a 1.83 GHz Mac Mini would need 2 gigs of RAM to do dual HD recordings, which is very pricey.
Of course, the nice thing about all these solutions is that they do not require a monthly service fee.
