Okay, my home media server/client solution is nearing completion. The final piece of what I have to do is to come up with a simple, elegant (WAF is important) solution for recording the TV that we like to watch (and that our girls - ages 2 and 5 like to watch).

I am doing all of this to replace the two hacked DirecTivos that had been the center of our home media for a long time. In December we got a HD set for the family room and switched from DirecTV to Verizon FiOS TV.

I'm very pleased with the Fios TV service and with the picture quality, the menu/guide software on the Motorola boxes doesn't even bother me.

What bothered me was that I lost the ability to stream back and forth between the 2 DVRs if we were upstairs or downstairs. This has led to duplicate season passes and wasted hard drive space, this makes me feel like we're wasting the resources of the 2nd DVR.

Here's my plan.

Local/live content:
1 Verizon HD-DVR in the living room with the Hi-Def set
1 Verizon SD Set Top box in the bedroom with the 2nd TV set
1 Verizon HD Set Top Box (non-DVR) in the basement/server room

Streaming Clients:
2 XBOXes running XBMC (1 in the living room, 1 in the bedroom)
1 Roku SoundBridge 500 for streaming audio in the kitchen (used to be in the living room, but XBMC handily replaces the soundbridge)

Servers:
1 Windows Home Server for sharing content (currently 1.2TB of storage - soon to be 2TB+) the WHS box will hold all music (already does) and DVDs (currently in process of ripping) and will also be the repository for "Season Pass" style recording of TV shows.
1 ??????? for TV recording

My question is what does the TV recording box look like?

I've got decent hardware for the PC, but I won't mind upgrading if I need to.

Here are my goals for this box:

1. Record SD and HD clear QAM digital channels from the Fios TV - natively store the bitstream
2. Record encrypted channels via S-Video hookup to a capture card - this will be what the HD (non-DVR) STB in the server room is used for.
3. For now I won't have a native HD streaming box on the HiDef set, and I don't want to have to record things twice anyway, so I would want to be able to downsample the HD TS recordings to half-HD resolution so XBMC can play them back
4. I want to have a good GUI for scheduling/reviewing "season passes" - ideally it needs to be done from the XBMC interface, but could be okay to do it from a client app or web browser on another PC on the LAN.
5. Ideally, we would be able to start viewing a program that is being recorded but is still in progress
6. After the recording is done, I will do the transcode/downsample of HD content on the WHS box, as it is the fastest thing I have in the server room (AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+)

I believe I am very close to the ideal solution.

I plan on an HDHomeRun to provide 2 tuners for Clear QAM content
I have an old Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250 from the days before I learned about Tivo video extraction. I will hook this up as the tuner for the stand alone box for encrypted content.

I want PVR software that can handle the 3 tuners - with each one having it's specific channel listing (actually the 2 QAM tuners would have the same - the other would be a much bigger list) and intelligently allocate tuners to recordings as needed.

I'm thinking that MythTV should be able to handle this - and there appears to be a Python script project to integrate MythTV into XBMC.

I know this is very long, and quite a bit off topic for this forum, but this is where I've found the most XBMX users on AVSForum, and I was hoping someone has done something similar and would share their experiences.

Thanks,

Ted