Homegrown TivoToGo
I was going to post a HOWTO on how to use the power of RSS and BitTorrent to be able to download television shows, but Phillip Torrone at Engadget did a better job than I ever could have, so check his guide out.
Now, I'm a huge Tivo fan with a number of hacked DirecTV-Tivo units throughout the house. I've even got a Series 1 unit that's nicely set up for video extraction, but the BitTorrent solution is really superior imho.
I have a 35-minute commute on the train two times a day ... perfect for catching up on some shows that I watch but Christine does not watch (The West Wing, South Park, and pretty much the entire Sunday night lineup on Fox). Azureus with the RSS plug-in dumps them straight to the laptop. Even better, most of the shows are captured in HD. Sweet!
This even came in handy last Thursday night when there was a DirecTV local channels outage across the country. Screwed up Survivor, CSI, and The Apprentice, which are three shows we watch. Bummer. But, a visit to "that tv torrents" site the next day, a few downloads, and a DVD burn, and we were set to watch them by Friday night. That sure was better than having to read about the episodes.