There are some good forums with tutorials such as byopvr.com or thegreenbutton.com. The best place to buy the specialized hardware you need is at PCAlchemy.com. The Summer Special Edition of MaximumPC was almost entirely devoted to building a PVR from scratch. You can find many more resources, guides and tutorials by googling building a PVR. If you are running windows, Windows Media Center Edition 2005 is pretty good but costs about $130. I think GB-PVR is actually superior and it is free. It is more difficult to set up but they do have pretty good tutorials. If you are going to do anything with the videos that you download, GB-PVR is the best bet because it uses the standard MPEG2 format whil MCE uses a wierd microsoft propriety format and the saved files all have to be converted to MPEG2 before you can do anything with them. They do not have the quality of MPEG2 and I think you would be disappointed in the display on you HiDef.