And that is, perfecting KnoppMyth.
Look at it this way; I have a Dish Network DVR right now with 2 TV's connected to the one box; now what in the world does anyone think is in that box, and what would it be programmed with ? [One clue, I don't think Dish pays any royaltys to Microsoft]. And it works with a WIRELESS remote. Really amazing stuff, huh ?
Basically, I'm just saying that almost anything one wants to do can be done; you just have to keep at it and learn all you can, and get lucky at times. I'm sure a Dish Network technician could tell you a lot. I also imagine if anyone took one of these boxes apart, it would probably be for naught, 'just guessing though. I figure they would have a "chassis intrusion" switch that would do something to make the unit unuseable, or else everything is so encypted that you'd have to send it to No Such Agency to find out what was there. I'm sure the programming cost a bundle, and they're not going to just give it away to anyone who pops open a DVR unit.
Anyway, things are improving with KnoppMyth all around, 'learning more and more.
Thanks are in order to many, many people here, at IVTV.org, and on....please contribrute something to IVTV if possible. They do a heck of a lot of work, as do many here and elsewhere.

the problem with satelite is decryption of signal. you should be able to open the box no problem, there may be a intrusion STICKER that's it.

lets try a quick google search

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MSI K8MM-V Micro ATX motherboard
3100+ socket 754 AMD Semperon
1GB DDR ram
1TB WD Green Hdd
Hauppauge PVR-350 (tv-out)
SiliconDust HDHomeRun Prime
16X memorex DVD drive

Now I don't have to pop open my own box !
Yeh, I would imagine encryption would be the big thing, and no circuit diagram. I'm sure the HD is not simply a plain ole Western Digital (or whoever) 140GB unit, and if it is, it's been manufactured to surely not have std connectors.
The software might even be in memory (like those memory sticks that hold lots data (4GB-?) which might be hard to access, don't know if it would be on the HD itself. I honestly wouldn't want to just copy their work if I had access to it, but I surely bet you could get some ideals from it.
Oh well, back to attempting to get a better picture out of my PVR-500; I've about decided it's a hopeless cause, but I keep pushing on.

Actually the Hard drives are a standard IDE drive. I believe they were using Western Digital during the 501/508 stage. Although you can not easily swap out the drive and replace it with a new one. The way that dishenwork was making sure that no one was tampering with anyting, they wrote specefic bits to the harddrive, your TSOP(the on board mem). These needed to be matched or else you could not "marry" the drive to the IRD.

Hope that gives a bit of history . If you have any questions let me know I am pretty good with the 501/508 irds. I used to be using Dish at my old Apartment.