Pretty much every post I read on PVR and HTPC discussion forums said the same thing: use a Hauppauge tuner card.
So I did.
Their numbering system is a little odd, and the PVR-150 is one of their newer cards (newer than the PVR-250 and PVR-350.) It’s also one of the cheapest, but has all the features I want. The Hauppauge PVR-350 adds in a hardware MPEG2 decoder, which supposedly gives great-looking output video with low CPU overhead. I decided I didn’t really need that.
I wound up buying one PVR-150, and one PVR-150MCE. The 150MCE is named for Microsoft’s Media Center Edition, but doesn’t require it. It just doesn’t include the IR blaster and remote control.
The Hauppauge remote control and IR receiver isn’t the most flexible thing around, but it does the job. And if you buy the retail PVR-150 box, it’s fairly inexpensive. Since I wanted two tuners but didn’t need two remotes, I got one PVR-150 and one PVR-150MCE.
The Hauppauges are all supported under Linux as well, using the IVTV driver, and seems to be the most popular choice for MythTV boxes as well. Since I hadn’t decided on an operating system or PVR software yet, the PVR-150s seemed like a safe choice.
Another option to two PVR-150s is a single PVR-500. The PVR-500 is essentially the same as the 150, but has two tuners built into the same card. It sounded like some people had some issues getting that working the way they wanted, and since I might have a potentially complicated setup, I didn’t want to mess with it. I’m considering having one tuner get the direct cable feed, and the other tuner go through the set-top box to be able to tune in HBO and the digital-only channels. From the posts I was reading, it wasn’t very clear if that was even possible in the PVR-500. It just seemed easier to get the two 150s.