I've been using a S1 UK Tivo for many years now and apart from the lack of HD, I'm generally happy with how it works. Whenever my family come to visit they're able to use it and know what to do. This even includes my mum who is generally terrible with technology.

The problem is that Tivo never really got that popular here as they stopped selling the UK units not that long after they were introduced. They continued to provide the subscription data for users however.

Tivo recently entered in a partnership with a cable TV company here and they're launching a new cable Tivo but its exclusive to the cable service and I use satellite. I'm unable to get cable as they don't offer it in my area. They recently announced that they're going to completely discontinue the S1 UK Tivo support and no longer provide guide data.

This brings me now to the problem of what do I replace the Tivo with? There are some murmurings of people generating their own guide data slices to insert into the Tivo database but nothing has actually happened yet. Most of the functionality of the Tivo relies on heavy preprocessing of the data as well so I'm unsure how well things like Season Passes would work.

The options I've considered so far are:

1. Look into the alternative guide data and see how well it works.

2. Give up on the Tivo completely and build a box for MythTV or Windows MCE.

3. Give up on the Tivo completely and get the Sky+ PVR that the satellite provider offers. The downside to this is that even with the latest boxes and firmware, I still hear complaints about how its flakey.

4. Give up on the Tivo and get another PVR box but ones that have a video input seem to be fairly scarce. They majority of them are Freeview FTA based it seems?