PVR Networkable?

[TPK]

Hello..

Currently I have a Samsung 50" DLP projection TV and TWC with a Pioneer HD cable box.... And I am enjoying life right now..

Unfortunately, this outdates my wonderful Replay TV, which can only handle standard definition....

The reason why I was using a Replay TV, as opposed to TWC's DVR box, is because with the Replay TV I can get into it over my network, and dump the video files down to my computer, and make DVD videos...

I could even get to the Replay TV thru the media center in my X-box and stream the videos that way, which was really nice, considering I have my x-box in another room...

But now that I have gone HD, it becomes less and less appealing to use my Replay TV, as I become more and more spoiled by the HD content...

So, my question is, Are any of these HD PVR solutions (either TWC's cable box, TIVO, or others) networkable, so I could potentially get to these PVRs with my PC and offload the videos to my PC for archiving to DVD or some other type of media??

People on this forum have mentioned that some TWC cable boxes have firewire... What does that mean?? Does that mean that I can output the video/sound to my PC via a firewire port and perhaps capture and archive video that way??

I was even toying around with the idea of building my own PVR with my own PC and a HD capture card.... But so far all the HD cards I have seen don't really 'capture' from component, but instead have built in HD tuners to capture OTA HD transmissions...

In the case of building my own PVR, I would be more interested in captureing video from my cable box, even if that means re-converting the analog signal back down into digital (just like my Replay TV did)...

Anyhow, I guess I was used to filling up my Replay TV hard drive with stuff, and then moving the videos to PC and making DVDs, and believe it or not, it worked really well... Now I would like to do the same thing with the HD content, and I guess I would like to know which direction I should start looking in...

Thank you much...

TPK

[jkane]

Tivo just released the TiVo To Go which copies shows to your PC over your home network. It's really slow, but it does work. But ... It's not available for the DirecTiVo which means you are still SD only and no better than your replay. :(

[mrmike]

The HD streams from an HD TiVo can be obtained with some minor hacking if you're not averse to that sort of thing. The HD streams from an LG3410 can be obtained with freely available SW for a Mac (VirtualDVHS) or by spending about $100 for the equivalent SW for a PC (Firebus DVTR) over IEEE-1394.

[borghe]

as mrmike said, the HD streams (or SD streams) from a Tivo are available with a minor amout of hacking. the SD streams are kind of funky, though can be written to DVD with minimal effort and watched on most players (every player I have ever tried). The HD streams on the otherhand are pretty much straightforward ATSC compliant streams and can be converted rather easily to transport streams and thus playable/recordable on anything that can handle HD media formats (D-VHS, Blue-ray, presumably HD-DVD-R, etc)