Hi, I live in a very multilingual family with English, German and Japanese speakers in the house and everyone wants their TV. I would like to be able to both record and live watch TV from channels from the UK and Japan at home in Switzerland.

I am lucky in that I have physical access to family in the UK, Japan and Germany and all locations have either FTTH or FTTC. Network infrastructure is largely done, all locations are linked via VPN. I can set up servers in all these locations as required.

My question is how best to go about the above. Until now I have been using slingboxes but it's not ideal/quality leaves a lot to be desired. In addition to live TV that the slingboxes can currently do (in poor quality), high quality offline viewing is the major goal. I would appreciate some guidance on

• what PVR solution is the most tried and tested and whether it would work 'remotely', i.e. via a VPN;

• slowest location has 40mbps up - is this enough? Not averse to slapping a powerful xeon in a server and running streams through an encoder in order to mitigate slower uploads but is this even feasible?;

• are there general recommendations on which platform to go with for the backend (linux+mythtv - is this a 'de-facto standard'?); and

• what is the most pain-free hardware for capturing (UK should be easier - again, is there a tuner card that is particularly well supported?; I imagine Japan will be tougher - there is a piece of hardware called friio that delivers decrypted .ts streams, does anyone have any experience with this?).

I am willing to spend plenty of time and a bit of money on the above as it's also a hobby but if someone in the know is looking at this and laughing then please let me know if I should give up... (if this is the wrong subreddit then apologies, do let me know what would be the best place to ask - thanks!)