Quest for a A personal PVR

Being a movie freak and to an extent History and Discovery channel shows, wanted to have a program that will pop in a notification when my favourite programs/movies are scheduled. I dont want to use teh reminder service provided by the Tata Sky set top box . I want it to be on the PC itself.

If it doesnt fit my schedule, I will have an option to record the program to my disk with ad skipping. I dont need to be aware whats the advertising industry is doing !. Any ways all this is available off the shelf if I get my hands on a pvr a personal video recorder. A mythtv installation will suit me just fine. The problem is In India I am struggling to lay my hands on a Hauppauge PVR-150, it has hardware recording and is supposed to work the best with MythTV. The TV tuner cards that are available in Hyderabad are teh pinacle ones, or I need to go along with Microsofts Media center edition. which is not an option.

Another problem is the unavailablity of xmltv for India, so forget teh mythtv setup, all I want now is a substitute for xml tv and it looks like I need to code fr this. ANd this isnt going to be easy, all the channels have a very elaborate schedule webpages, which cant be readily integrated into a consuming program. So lots of parsing needs to be done aswell.