http://www.sagetv.com/linuxOEMedition.html

Has anyone tried it? If the Zap2It situation doesn't get resolved, this might be a way to get a DVR that has access to the program data, but that doesn't require running Windows.

The things I really like about mythtv are...

1. auto skip commercials
2. save recordings as mpg
3. free

of course there are probably other things but my theory is that a commercial provider has a hard time auto skipping commercials and allowing you to save the recordings in an easily distributable format. While I have never distributed anything I have saved shows to a windows laptop in mpg format to watch while traveling.

Might be interesting to see if you had sageTV and only ran it at it's most basic level but used mythtv to get the TV listings from the sageTV sync. Now we're cooking with beer.

Once zap2it goes dark I would be VERY willing to pay the $80 for a SageTV license (I might even pay an extra premium) if they would permit me to download their guide data into MythTV without actually installing SageTV.

I'm not sure what could be better than "cooking with beer," but that would be it...