Help with creation, editing, or playback of sounds, images, or video. Amarok, audacious, mplayer, grip, cdparanoia and anything else that makes a sound or plays a video.
You may want to look at MythTV over FreeVo. AFAIK, it is a more mature application and it has a built in editor that you can use to flag and delete commrcials.
I you use MythTV you can seperate all the tasks onto different machines. You can run "backends" on both machines, have the one on the machine with the card record. Tell the one on the fast machine to transocde, and run a "frontend" on the fast machine. I highly recommend it.