MythTV

Was a long and hard thing to set it up yet it worthed every frustration and fallbacks. When you're on top and running it you'll be glad you didn't give up, I'm sure! :-) It may become a part of your everyday life - if you really have little time for watching TV and you want to be in control of it all (what and when) mythTV is one of the best open source solution around.
First of all the sucky part is to configure the stations and next to calibrate recording options. After that you'll have to look for some sort of source for TV program. Here in Hungary the only way to get one is to use XMLTV. Luckily MythTV supports it perfectly! Definitely you have to read the howtos and manuals found at mythtv.org and read the step-by-step guide to be sure that you don't miss any possible advantage of MythTV. Just setting up the grabber cards and channels and TV program source is just not that easy as it is all related to very specific things as recording hardware, input source type, program source type and all that things. Plus it involves mysql database too. Luckily ubuntu has a package called mythbuntu installable which helps a lot with its mythtv control center application.
I also recommend to check out MythTV plugins in your distro. It has very nice music jukebox functionality - MythMusic. Some others are MythWeather, MythNews, MythVideo and so on.

Well in my box I have placed the already mentioned analogue TV card and later I've also added one older TV grabber card of mine which works with the bttv kernel module (it has a brooktree chip on it). Well,well, I had to find out that with such card it's a different method that is needed to get audio recorded. I had to use an audio jack-jack cable to connect TV tuner's audio output to the soundcard's line-in and also upon starting mythtv I have to run an unmute script for the bttv v4l2 device. For that you will need v4lctl tool installed, ubuntu contains a package for it. So if you're stuck with an old analogue card presenting problems in audio recording you may have to do this thing too.It's a luck that I have a TV provider that uses good old analogue signal - that way I could split up the signal with simple coaxial splitter T elements inserted to the cable jungle behind the PC. :P If you have digital signal it's a bit harder for sure. So currently I can watch TV on my normal TV, and record 2 shows at the same time on the HTPC in the background. The CPU is capable to handle it alright, recording in MPEG4 stream, good quality - one hour of recording about 2Gigabytes.

Now, now, let's add some screenshots for you to see how it looks - if you don't already know it. And what's best in it? It doesn't run on Windows! :P