Back when my cable provider (Charter) first offered their DVR's, I discovered that with 3 adults, all with different viewing tastes, one DVR with it's standard recording capabilities and storage capacity was simply not up to our household's time-shifted viewing appetites.
Attempts to obtain a second DVR, at an additional monthly expense, were solidly refused by Charter. They maintained that their supply of DVR units was limited, and that providing more than one DVR in the same household was not part of their business plan. Not a very smart move, from my viewpoint, when you consider that most satellite services have been offering the option of multiple DVR's for quite some time now. Isn't it wonderful how having an exclusive cable territory allows cable operators to ignore customers wants/needs and adopt a take it or leave it attitude towards the quality of services provided? Oh, well, that's a rant for another day.
Solution to this dilemma?
KnoppMyth
http://www.mysettopbox.tv/
I started out small, with one PVR-150 and one frame grabber tuner in the backend, a minimalist frontend, and 80 Gb of storage (2 times the storage on the Charter DVR).
Today my backend supports 3 PVR-150's, the ability to record (paid for) premium channels by using a digital converter feeding directly into one of the PVR's, 3 frontends, and 750Gb of online storage, with an additional 300Gb on a separate NAS for archival storage of my personal DVD collection. All four units have fully supported APC battery backup systems, which protects against data loss here in rural Michigan, where the power can be unstable, even at the best of times. The frontends have replaced the need for stand alone DVD players at each of the 3 viewing stations, and anything that has been recorded can be viewed at anytime by anyone. Additionally, my entire music collection, which is quite extensive, since I am an independent DJ/Karaoke operator, can be accessed from the frontends, mapped into the Knoppmyth backend and stored on the same NAS as the media files.
Being relatively new to LINUX at the beginning, there was a bit of a learning curve, especially as the system evolved into it's current configuration, but there was always a wealth of information on the MythTV website
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page and the KnoppMyth User Forums
http://www.knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/
Interestingly enough, Charter subsequently did add the ability to add an additional external USB hard drive to extend the storage capacity of their original DVR, but since it shares it's resources with viewing and recording tasks, it simply lacks the flexibility of the Knoppmyth backend.
Expanding storage costs aside, and using eBay as a bargain outlet for components, the backend unit ran about $250 to bring to it's current state, and each frontend ran $150 or less. After that, the only other expense is the $20/yr subscription fee to Schedules Direct
http://www.schedulesdirect.org/ to obtain the needed TV listings data, which is hands down the biggest
entertainment bargain you could find anywhere.
Up next, the addition of a slave backend to support a recently acquired HDTV tuner to record unencrypted QAM cable channels, and additional tuners for those rare occasions when I do actually max out the system's recording abilities.
Note: I realize this post is somewhat off topic, since the original posting is about suing Time Warner for the right to use alternative set top boxes, but there are already alternative solutions available, such as MythTV and it's various derivatives, which can obtain virtually any functionality, short of a cable card, that the user desires, and requires no special lawsuit to implement on any current cable operators system.
DaveJ45
