Firewire SDK - Tivo Killer

As everyone knows I am somewhat of a Tivo freak, its one of my favorite electronic toys there is; I own two Tivo’s along with a couple computers running Tivo server software so I can store shows for later use. Well I also own a couple of HDTV’s so onw let down of Tivo is that the Standard series 2 Tivo can’t tune nor record HD programs, I realize that series 3 Tivo’s can record HD but the cost is pretty high along with the hard time I hear that the cable company gives you getting cable cards for the Tivo, so after looking at things like MythTV and thing I found a few sites that talk about recording HD through the firewire output right on my cable box, I happen to have a Motorola cable box from Charter cable, we took a standard Firewire cable and plugged it between my powerbook and the cable box, downloaded the Firewire SDK (Software Developer Kit) number 23.

After installing the SDK with just a few clicks (thank you Apple for using an installer on this software) fired up the utility used to record content (found at /Developer/FireWireSDK23/Applications/AVCVideoCap.app) told the software what channel and how long to record, gave it a file name and it switched the channel on the cable box and recorded HD content directly from the cable box to the powerbook.. sooooo simple… I then played the video in VLC media player being as the .m2t file is a version of mpg2. it is awesome, HD content right to the hard drive… amazing quallity. I did notice some stuttering on my older powerbook playing the video, so we tried the same on thatmacdude.com ’s new intel based macbook pro and it plays like a champ…. I also played it on a PC at work that uses a pretty good processor and it plays flawless.
My question is: as easy is this was to do without hacking or buying anything special, using a free download from Apple (that comes with the source code and everything) why hasn’t anyone written a full-on application that turns any apple into a mock Tivo? a mac mini with a big ol hard drive would do the job, then with a couple of free applications you can not only watch recorded HD video but you could convert it and burn the data or watch it on an iPod or what ever you want.
It really was simple to get going (hardest part was trying to remember my apple log-in and password to download the SDK). So to all you programmers get on it!