As you guessed, guys, the guide data is the problem. One of the vendors' (Pioneer?) machines do have a sticker advertising access to a guide service I never heard of, but I am almost sure it is not available here (I will check, obviously). Other than that, there is a free web site that scrapes various channel's sites and presents what is found in a half-decent format, sends e-mail alerts etc, but I am almost sure it won't work with any of those boxes.

This, of course, makes Myth (or anything else hackable or programmable) an attractive option (since I could, conceivably, rig it to "read" e-mails and program itself accordingly). However, I don't think I have patience to build my own box at the moment...

I agree that thing like this is a little more than a VCR replacement, but even replacing a roomful of tapes with a disk and/or a stack of DVDs (with better image quality) is some improvement. So, I would settle for something I have to program myself, but I would like to know few details:

• Does it play all the stuff most stand-alone DVD players do (DviX, mp3, jpg...)
• Does it interface to a PC in some way, and if so, what functionality it offers
• What is playback functionality like
• What kinds of DVD archives it produces
• etc - you see what I mean

Thanks!