I was reading some techhead magazines on the plane yesterday, and pcmag has been doing some investigation in these same questions (media pc versus TiVo versus cable). I'll post the exact links from the article when I get home (or you can delve into pcmag.com).
The part that sounded like it might be important to you is that with a media pc, there's a way to set things up so that you can automatically remove commercials (I'll send the link from home) before burning to DVD or whatnot. That sounds like it may be an important feature to you. The article said that it takes about 40 minutes to run through an hour long program, but you could set it to run while doing housework.
If streaming from your computer is important (I don't know), the magazine said that it's better to go with a media pc (to do it with TiVo requires that your computer be on ANYWAY, and you can't do it from a cable company's box).
I've been doing research on streaming media from your computer for my parents (they now have two HD TVs larger than 50" and Mom is sitting on the floor hooking her digital video camera to the front of the tv!), and personally, I'm favoring Buffalo's setup (an external RAID storage hooked to the network and media box hooked to the tv). For my parents, it's a good option so that the videos don't get LOST in a harddrive failure (home movies of my sister's baby), but if you're mostly recording from TV it may not be an issue.
There's some interesting options for streaming TV from your main box to other tvs (so if you drop $800 on a TiVo, you don't have to do it for every tv), but they still cost in the $hundreds range. I still consider the cable box (in my case, a pair of them) to be the most economical way to go, and my house is already wired with cat5 cable (making some options easier/cheaper). Shows that I'm not sure which TV I'll watch them on (like Mythbusters, which is cool in HD, but we tend to watch more at night as we're getting ready for bed) just get recorded on both DVRs.
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The part that sounded like it might be important to you is that with a media pc, there's a way to set things up so that you can automatically remove commercials (I'll send the link from home) before burning to DVD or whatnot. That sounds like it may be an important feature to you. The article said that it takes about 40 minutes to run through an hour long program, but you could set it to run while doing housework.
If streaming from your computer is important (I don't know), the magazine said that it's better to go with a media pc (to do it with TiVo requires that your computer be on ANYWAY, and you can't do it from a cable company's box).
I've been doing research on streaming media from your computer for my parents (they now have two HD TVs larger than 50" and Mom is sitting on the floor hooking her digital video camera to the front of the tv!), and personally, I'm favoring Buffalo's setup (an external RAID storage hooked to the network and media box hooked to the tv). For my parents, it's a good option so that the videos don't get LOST in a harddrive failure (home movies of my sister's baby), but if you're mostly recording from TV it may not be an issue.
There's some interesting options for streaming TV from your main box to other tvs (so if you drop $800 on a TiVo, you don't have to do it for every tv), but they still cost in the $hundreds range. I still consider the cable box (in my case, a pair of them) to be the most economical way to go, and my house is already wired with cat5 cable (making some options easier/cheaper). Shows that I'm not sure which TV I'll watch them on (like Mythbusters, which is cool in HD, but we tend to watch more at night as we're getting ready for bed) just get recorded on both DVRs.
I'm just rambling...