If you like TiVo, but really want more freedom to tinker than TiVo gives you, head on over to MythTV, a homebrew personal video recorder (PVR) project. I have a friend who has MythTV server (running on Gentoo Linux) in his attic with 1Tb of storage and diskless front end systems based on VIA EPIA-M motherboards. He can store almost a year of TV or 1000 movies and watch them anywhere in the house. After all, its just data.