Need help choosing TV card to watch cable TV on my computer

First thing you need to do is find out from your service provider if they support those cards to decode their channels with a cable card and if they have a cable card they offer for use.

I have a Hauppauge WinTV-HVR 2250 in a box - have not installed it yet. But I've been through the manuals and the parts.

This board has two input connectors from coax cable. One is for its FM Radio tuner. The other feeds TWO separate TV tuners, and each includes its own hardware signal encoder to convert any incoming analog TV signal into computer video files. It can handle ATSC Digital (over-the-air) signals, analog TV (older style signals), or Clear QAM digital TV signals from a cable system that are NOT scrambled. Digital signals (ATSC or Clear QAM) are handled in their native digital form without needing the hardware encoders. It can do both Clear QAM and analog signals from the same cable line, but not over-the-air ATSC signals at the same time. What it cannot do on its own is handle the scrambled digital channels on a cable system, BUT it does have a way to do this using the normal equipment from your cable company. It does NOT need a special card from them added to the tuner.

The Hauppauge 2250 card includes a second set of input connectors on a separate panel that fits into one of the exposed slots on the back of your computer. The card itself comes with a short cable to allow you to connect to the card, in addition to the FM and TV coax cables, an S-Video, a Composite Video, and stereo audio signals. The separate panel provides a complete second set of inputs for those same signal types.

If you are using any of the digital TV or pay TV channels on your cable system, you have a set-top tuner box and its remote. They allow you to select one channel to view, and pass the signal on to your TV as an unscrambled signal. The Hauppauge 2250 card can use this equipment. The 2250 card comes with TWO items called "IR Blasters". Each is a little IR transmitter that you mount on your set-top tuner so that is output will reach the tuner's normal input sensor that its remote uses. When you need to tune a particular cable channel, the Hauppauge system uses IR signals from an IR Blaster to change the channel on the cable system's tuner, and that is the signal that goes to the Hauppage card.

Now, if you connect the cable system's tuner box to the Hauppauge 2250 card using a short coax cable, then only one TV channel can be fed to the card by the cable tuner box. If, however, you want to be able to deal with two channels at the same time, you do it differently. First, you need another tuner/descrambler box from your cable company. (Exception - see next paragraph.) Then you connect from each via S-Video (or Composite Video) and stereo audio cables to the extra inputs on the card itself and on its second panel. In this way you can feed two TV signals (in analog form) to the card, thus allowing you to work with both simultaneously since the card itself has two independent tuner / hardware encoder systems.

Another way you should be able to deal with two TV channels at once is if you can always be sure that one of them will be unscrambled analog or Clear QAM channels on your cable. In that case you'd put a coax signal splitter in front of your one cable descrambler box and run one signal straight to the 2250's TV input via coax. That input can handle any non-scrambled channel on your cable. You'd run the second coax to the tuner/descrambler, and feed its output to the S-Video (or Composite Video) and stereo audio input connectors, and this is the input to be used for scrambled channels that have been descrambled by the box.

As I said, the Hauppauge 2250 comes with two IR Blaster units. You fit one to each of your cable tuner/descrambler boxes that you are using, and let it (or them) under control of the Hauppauge software tell those boxes what channel to select and forward to the Hauppauge card.

The Hauppauge 2250 comes with their own software, Win TV. You can use it OR use the Windows Media Centre to control the system. It also comes with its own remote control and a sensor for that, to use with the software for channel changes, etc. When you're using the system to watch any TV, it behaves very much like a PVR machine. It records what you're watching so you can pause, re-run, and continue, etc. It can save the program to a permanent file. You can pre-program it to capture any TV show (or even two at once) and save it to a file. In other words, the system completely does what any PVR can do, so you do NOT need an additional PVR machine. OP, the Shaw advisors were telling you how THEY want you to do this - rent one of their PVR's. They do not know how the Hauppauge system works, and don't want to know. For one thing, most PVR's come with smaller HDD units that limit just how many programs you can store. With a computer you can easily expand your storage capacity with larger HDD's.

There's one important item I cannot tell you about how Shaw does things. Any cable service can place TV channels on the cable in three ways, and some do all three - different groups of channels in different ways. They are:
1. Analog (old style) signals with no scrambling - the Hauppauge system can handle these directly;
2. Clear QAM Digital TV signals - these are digital TV, but still unscrambled, and the Hauppauge system can handle these directly; and,
3. Scrambled QAM digital TV - these signal are scrambled and you need a cable company's set-top tuner/descrambler to watch these channels. It descrambles and then sends the TV signal to your TV on a fixed channel (like Channel 3) via coax, and/or as analog S-Video (or Composite Video) plus separate stereo audio signals.

My mother-in-law has Shaw Canada service in her home and an old analog TV that cannot tune digital channels. She uses a set-top tuner box and its remote, and it forwards the TV signal on Channel 3 to her TV as an analog TV signal. As far as I can tell, there are no analog TV channels on the cable, because she can't get anything without the tuner box. I expect that SOME of the channels are unscrambled Clear QAM, but I'm not sure of that. And certainly there are scrambled pay TV channels on that cable.