Adding Digital support to my custom home "Tivo"

I purchased a Hauppauge HVR-1600 (Model 1178) and sorted through adding it to my Linux-based home recording system which runs MythDora 10.21. I've already had a Hauppauge PVR-500 for 2 years and it works great for recording two TV shows at once, but it only supports analog. I've wanted to make the switch to digital for some time, but I knew that the cards at the time were still new and digital support in general was green. Comcast still has analog support, and as far as I know hasn't plans to cancel that any time soon. However, digital comes in so much more crisper, even for SD shows. Plus, there are a number of sub-channels now that are only available via digital. I'm glad to find that digital support with the HVR-1600 is solid and works great with MythTV.

Hauppauge HVR-1600

The HVR-1600 is a great start for someone who wants to have analog and digital support as it has a tuner for each. Now my home system can record one digital show and three analog shows at the same time. You'd think that'd be plenty, and really I don't need any analog tuners if I had more digital tuners, but I see my upcoming show recordings schedule now has conflicts where there are shows on digital-only channels (on the digital-only sub-channels that aren't available via my analog tuners), so a few shows that are HD won't get recorded on digital unless I force it to do HD, and in that case it'll bump the sub-channel show to not get recorded. I'm glad to have the HVR-1600 so I could test it out, and I already had the PVR-500, but the ideal system right now would be two or three HVR-1600 cards so multiple digital channels could be recorded at once. Actually, I think I'd just sit and wait until the Hauppauge dual-tuner digital card gets Linux support. I hear the HDHomeRun would get me dual-tuner digital support as well cheaper than buying HVR-1600s.

What I really love is being able to take shows and compress them down and store them on either external HDDs or other systems or on DVD and basically keep them forever, for free, and totally legal. Oh, and commercial auto-skip and then editing out for the final storage makes it all the better. Being able to watch any TV show recorded from any PC anywhere is amazing too (in HD/original format if I'm at home using the WiFi, or streaming and compressed when remote).