AVerMedia ATSC Tuner Card any good?

Yep. This is a pretty damn good HD tuner.

You can put two in a Windows Media Center box, and both will work great. With two HD tuners, you can record two HD programs simultaneously or record one and watch another program live.

Note that Avermedia says that WMCE requires the presence in the box of an analog tuner that does hardware MPEG encoding before WMCE will install and setup the AverTVHD A180 tuner.

The AverHDTV A180 will also work in a plain Windows XP box.

Yeah after doing more research I found that I can't really do what I want with anything that is available right now. I want to basically use my computer as a full DVR with HBO and Showtime (I pay for these), but it's alot more complicated than it would appear.

Ah well...thanks though!

you can do it all you would need to do is use something like video out on the player and then video in on the tuner card...
use a ati hdtv wonder.. i can confirm that it would work on it because i own one myself...
it has video in...

But what about simutanious paid-programming shows? I subscribe to NHL Center Ice. Also, what about shows on different channels at seperate times? I could only set the box to one channel and it wouldn't change to the other for the next program.

I'll just wait for something more like this:
http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2662...