No segmented mpeg via m3u8 on anything but APPL devices, it's their standard, like microsofts smooth streaming (though I do some STB guys who have written a linux app to handle smooth streaming chunks)... but there's nothing for android yet that I am aware. It's true for streaming to mobile devices, and well really any IP connected devices, some form of adaptive bit rate streaming over HTTP is the way to go. It's funny, the company that pioneered this stuff Move Networks is basically out of business but Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe (plus the big CDN's like Akamai and Limelight) are all moving towards HTTP streaming. For the OP, it's H.264 as everyone and their mother has said so far, works on both handsets you're talking about and is easy. FFMpeg is probably doing the work regardless of what front end wrapper you're putting on it.

The answer to life the universe and everything...

Agreed. For what the OP is asking for, any of the HD flavored tivo's is ideal. Coupled with pytivo you can throw pretty much anything you ever have at it, and when it comes to the best DVR, tivo wins hands down. There simply is NO (reasonable) argument (that I can think of) to be made disputing that fact. The tivo UI/UX (despite whatever issues one may have with it) is just better than every other option out there. I've fooled around with everything under the sun starting with the first xbox based xbmc builds up to a win7 MCE HTPC. Fun to mess around with, not fun to rely on long term and add in the WAF and it's over. I use my tivo's for everything and stopped futzing around with all these other "projects" Unless of course you get your television from a satellite based provider then... I got nothin'

No, it's not worthless, it lacks a feature you want. Personally it's super for me, it will record the HD broadcasts of the football games I currently use a vastly inferior SA box from my cable co to record. I have no need to extract or archive that. I certainly have no interest in extracting any network television show, since I would never want to watch that more then once.

Perhaps, I could become interested in extraction for a movie on HBO or something, but yo know it's not necessary. I'm pretty happy to rent/buy a film I want to see more then once.

You might want to consider the way you word your subject lines. I would would have used something like:
If I cannot extract recorded programs...

just sayin' -dm