I still live in CRT TV land. You know, the kind of TV that requires you to build an extension on your apartment’s TV nook to support its girth. I probably won’t upgrade to plasma or LCD or the-new-best-TV-thingy until a) my TV breaks or b) we move.
Still, that hasn’t stopped me from being curious about TiVo and HD-TVs and all the other new-fangled tele-gadgets. Alexandra offers a very thorough rundown of the state of Shaw’s HD-TV and PVR offerings:
The up-side: Shaw’s PVR is readily available, HDTV-friendly, and has a dual tuner — not features that are available in cable-ready TiVo units at the moment. The downside: it’s $577 after programming credits, which is $300 more than either the tuner-only unit OR than a TiVo unit with comparable capacity.
Coincidentally, I was looking at my TV and Internet provider’s PVR offering. Inexplicably, Novus doesn’t list it on their website, but their PVR starts at $850 (with some relatively small credit for Internet service). That struck me as highway robbery, so I’m leaning toward a standalone PVR+DVD recorder like this one.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
Glad you found my hdtv post useful. For what it’s worth, we passed on the DVD recorder-style Tivos b/c it sounds like the DVD-enabled versions have some loss in image quality because DVD image encoding is so different from Tivo encoding that there’s some degradation involved in making the two compatible. At least in theory, using Tivo Desktop (for PC) or Galleon (open source Tivo compatibility for Mac or Linux) should let you move Tivo recordings off your Tivo and onto your computer, where you can burn to your heart’s delight.