Train yourself not to watch live TV and just have 2-3 tuners/boxes to make your big PVR work. Most kids tend to always want to watch the same thing over and over and over and over again anyway. Add in a DVD library and you'll cover most of what you'd want as well.

or you just accept the fact you're going to have to go digital -> analog -> digital.

You can do that? Is there a way of receiving digital TV, and then distribute it in the house as an analogue stream? And also, can you use this up to 1080p? (I can guess the answer to this, but figure I'd ask anyway :))

Not the way you're thinking no. I meant set-top box analog output -> TV card in computer. You'd get SDTV out of it.

If you require a set-top box (that is, if the channels on the TV itself are useless) then there's not really anything you can do but have as many set-top boxes as channels you want to watch/record simultaneously.

Before, you needed to connect your digital TV set top box to your TV via scart!) So again, that would leave me with analogue TV as the only option... (for this reason MythTV is also not really an option...)

The server uses an ir transmitter to change channel. It works *perfectly*.

You do lose "interactive" TV.

The house is entirely built from the ground up with energy saving in mind. In the ground plate there will be 15 cm of isolation (apart from the concrete ground plate which will be 20 cm thick) so the cold cannot get through the ground floor. In the walls there will be 10 cm of high-isolation plates. Below the room there will be 18 cm of isolating fabric. The house will be heated with a heatpump and ventilated with a mechanical ventilation pump with heat recovery fed with air that goes through a 'Canadian pitt' (don't know the term in English, but in essence this means that the air which is pulled into the house is guided through a 30 meter long 20 cm wide tube that is put under the ground 2 meter deep - the air that goes through this tube is thus pre-heated to the temparture of the ground, winter and summer 10°C-12°C - this has the advantage that in the winter you never draw in frozen air and thus can't kill your ventilation pump, and in summer this air can cool the house)

That's pretty much like ours, it's designed to the German PassivHaus standard, we'll have mechanical heat recovery, and a "labyrinth" (your Canadian pit), no ground source heat pump but we've got a lot of land so will be putting in a sizeable wind turbine if we get permission from the council.

I'll post some pics on a separate thread when I get the chance, our architect does stuff on paper not electronically.

we'll only require the electrical power company for electricity

What about water and sewer? Well and septic tank?

We've been told by lots of people that ground source heat pumps can be highly inefficient, in order for it to be effective the system has to be designed very well.

The key to our house is insulation, walls, floor, ceiling all super insulated, all windows triple glazed.

There are a few of threads about it at www.aecb.net (you should join, a very useful organisation).