This may be a stupid question but I need to ask it. Why can’t we use an old dvr like say tivo or some other that has gone out of business that already has the hardware requirements we need. Duel video cards encoders and stuff, put in our own large hard drive lode up knoppmyth and go. It would seem easier than spending hundreds of dollars building a computer to do something that the dvr boxes already dos for less. Plus we would all be on the same page for updates and revisions.

Drivers. There are already people developing open source drivers for things like the bt878 cards and the hauppauge cards etc. But it is a little hard to get drivers for a proprietary tuner card like the one Tivo uses. Not to mention all the other non-standard hardware in a Tivo.

The series 1 tivo was built with off the shelf parts I thought and the software is based off linux. linux being an open source, I would think it would be easy to reverse engineer the drivers.

Linux is open source, but Tivo is not. All of the drivers and software they developed rides on top, therefore is not availible to the general public. Until they decide to release the sourcecode to their drivers, and or software, your Tivo will stay a Tivo.

Honer