Just thinking out loud......
I don't have a TV Tuner card at the moment (but probably soon will) so I'm not familiar at all with the ins and outs of how these things work, in particular the software side other than a bit of googling....
In an ideal world JRiver would provide an interface for both 'live' TV from a DVB card, with a 'TV Guide' interface to allow for channel selection and selecting programmes to record; and also an interface for sorting recorded programmes into some logical order so that you can easily find them again and add niceities like fanart and episode information.
So, back to reality....
Now, I understand that theaterview can 'call' a particular program to open, so it would be easy to have a menu option to open a dedicated DVB program say for live tv, eg. DVBViewer or whatever is considered good. Now I imagine that the same program would have its own means of a 'TV Guide' and selecting either a live channel to watch or to select a programme to record. All this I can work out from the various DVB websites. Presumably when you're done with TV and want to return to JRiver you just close the DVB program and you'd be back in JRiver. (I used to do this with PowerDVD for bluray so I assume it would work the same)
So it really could be an almost 'seamless' interface to work it this way.
Now, my question is: does/can the DVB program save the recorded files in an intelligent way eg. with data from the EPG either in the filename or 'tagged' in the file? Such that the file could be in a JRiver watched folder and automatically imported into JRiver and sorted into a custom view? For example if I set the DVB program to record all episodes of House and Lost, they would be automatically imported into JRiver into a view (say TV->Recorded->TV Series->House) and they would appear with appropriate data (series no, episode no, etc.).
If this was possible, then the recorded programs would be able to take advantage of the JRiver playback engine (madVR etc.) and have a 'nice' logical appearance.
Cheers,
SBR