I built a MCE machine approximately a year ago, with dual DVB tuners and it is absolutely awesome. I did this because I can't get Tivo here in Spain and it only took me a short time to get used to the differences between the two. They're selling complete systems with tuners, remotes, and big hard disks for something like $600 now so I don't know that it's worth doing the build-it-yourself thing anymore.

TV recording works for me pretty much the same way as Tivo did; there's not any "suggested" recordings, but those were seldom of interest to me anyway. What I like is the other stuff that MCE does so well: picks up the US TV shows I download with uTorrent and RSS feeds, burns a show to DVD just using the remote, manages music and photos (and does a cool slideshow mixing the two), syncs my newly-recorded TV shows to my Portable Media Center for use on the plane or elsewhere, lets me watch stuff on demand through Online Spotlight, and lets me view what's being recorded, manage recordings, and add new ones via the web anywhere in the world. It also handles teletext and subtitles really well (something important for me here).

I tried the open-source MediaPortal, BeyondTV, and a couple of other wannabes, but there were way too many rough edges. The real drawback is that all the others rely on XMLTV for scraping TV listings off of newspaper web sites, etc. and the results are at best spotty. MCE includes a (free) guide subscription that is similar to what the Tivo has, so you can search by actor, keyword, etc.