If you are a little PC savvy then go for TIVO. You cant buy them anymore but plenty on eBay.

You can hack the code and plenty of the hacks are openly available.

I can get to the user interface anywhere from the web, it emails me each day to tell me what its gonna record, sits on my home network so can transfer stuff to my PC, you can upgrade the hard drives inside to massive storage etc etc

Its not easy but there is plenty of help out there on forums etc