Gotta love those Apex units... They're making TVs now - my parents picked one up today. $150 for a stereo 20" unit - about $100 cheaper than the other brands. Problem is, the TV is stereo - but the tuner isn't :)

Daytek actually. The Apex was $10 cheaper, but it looked...well, cheap. ;)

This one doesn't look half-bad at least. I'm actually kind of excited about getting some use out of my PVR now - timeshift from broadcast to VCD on CD-RWR. We're usually in bed at 9ish now (because of freaky schedulish things) so I haven't been able to watch a couple of shows that I really like for quite some time. Dropping "Law & Order" onto a CD-R means we can watch something remotely decent in place of "Jeopardy" and "Entertainment Tonight".

This might now sound like a big deal to Tivo owners, but Canadians don't really have any great options as far as PVRs go - most of it is homegrown or unavailable up here in the Great White North.

As far as your parents tuner woes go, they should use a cheap stereo VCR as their tuner if they have one kicking around. My one beef with DVD players nowadays is that they don't usually include tuner technology...

That's actually what we're doing, wrt the VCR tuner. The old TV had to go due to "interesting colour" issues, and the fact that its tuner has been on the fritz for a little over 4 years now, or abot half the life of the unit.

You can get TiVO working here - a Series 1 unit can be hacked to get its program listings from an XMLTV server. I've got a link somewhere, but I seem to have lost it...

Apex units seem to be OK to me - a friend who works in the AV department at Best Buy will buy nothing else. Given what percentage of his income this guy devotes to his stereo, that kind of endorsement is good enough for me.

"You can get TiVO working here - a Series 1 unit can be hacked to get its program listings from an XMLTV server. I've got a link somewhere, but I seem to have lost it..."

Very cool - Might be a little bit complex for my feeble brain, but it definitely bears some further examination. Doing the sneakernet shuffle of timeshifted programs from my PC to the DVD player is going to wear thin after a while...

On second though... this might just be that link