I’ve been playing with downloading videos and treating them as recordings in MythTV because the MythTV player is nicer than Xine, and because it works well as a demo for the linux.conf.au tutorial I am working on at the moment. I wont document it here because it’s not quite ready, but it’s actually quite easy and works really well.
For the impatient, a good starting point is this tip is a good starting point, the additional stuff I had to do was around setting up a channel row in the otherwise empty channel table.