Ever since I started playing with digital TV on my computer(s) 5-6 years ago, I've been intermittently messing around with the idea of writing a video recorder. Until now, I've mostly been using a set of perl scripts I hacked together in the early days. They Worked For Me, but there were several things they didn't do well:

1. No automatic allocation/resolution of recordings to specific tuners
2. Only runs on one machine (i.e. won't handle several machines each with tuners in)
3. Hard to change recording details once set