Newer receivers have an ethernet port so that "on demand" programming can be
sucked over broadband connections instead of the slower phone line. Anyone
mess with this yet?

I'm curious because it would be nice to offload and save recordings from the
DVR, or even upload some into it - or play DVDs through the system instead
of an external DVD player, etc...

I've heard that the DVD-enabled boxes have Linux as their OS, so I wonder if
there's a usable SSH port open, etc....