I am going to try to rig up a home made Home theater PC with a DVR. I figure that it can be done with stuff that I have sitting around, although I am not sure how difficult it is going to be for me to make it work. I have Comcast cable tv and they are obviously not going to help me with this. The idea is to get out of paying them the monthly fee that they want to charge me for a DVR. I am wondering how hard it will be to figure out how to legally decrypt the HD signal. If you look at the laws they are supposed to help you do this pretty cheaply with a device called a CableCard. That was about ten years ago and the cable tv providers have been doing a really good job of getting out of doing that. In theory you should be able to rent one of these things for a very low price per month. I think it is legally supposed to cost a dollar and seventy five cents per month.

At any rate I have pretty much everything that I would need aside from one of these devices. I am guessing that I would have to get a video card for a computer which has a slot for something they call a Type M CableCard. It is another story to figure out how to get all the pieces to fit together and do the job in the way that the DVR that they charge you fifteen or twenty dollars a month to rent. The thing that I have not quite figured seems a bit simplistic, that is the concept of a program guide. You can not really have a DVR that works if you do not have one.