I've been looking at buying a tv tuner card and debating is it worth it. WinTV starts at $50 has pertty much the basics. All In Wonder card by ATI has cool functions like surfing the web with transparent TV in the background and a few more nice functons starting around $120 - $160 and comes with ATI 128mb graphic card or better depending how much you want to spend. My problem with that is eventually the graphic card will be out dated and if you want to upgrade your video card do you have to take your all in wonder card out and lose your tv tuner? I'm not that good with graphic cards i don't know. There is a few more tv cards out there. Also what about direct tv and digital cable. Most card only support 125 channels. Does that mean you miss out on the rest of the channels? HDTV all in wonder card say you can pick High Definition channels out of the air. How many channels and is it legal. I'm getting a headache thinking of the choices.

Do not get ATI if you are planning on recording MPEG2. ATI cheats a little and uses what it calls a "software processor". In other words it does not have an onboard processor like other tv cards. Instead it processes the raw capture data through some software and you computer processor. Since software is never as fast as hardware, the ATI card has trouble recording MPEG2, and it ties up your processor so it's difficult to do any multi tasking. You said win tv has the basics.... yes, this is true, but it also has its own dedicated processor. Your computer hardly has to do any work, and recording MPEG2 is not an issue.

I'm not against WinTv at all it is the cheapest way to go. I'm still not sure if a tv card is worth it. Are you able to look at channels above 125. All my movie channels are up in the 500's.

I'm on digital tv (through the phone line.) My reciever box does the tuning and it's fed to the tv card via Svideo. In other words I get everything that I order from my phone company... regular tv, movie channels, special channels...

That is the way to go. What card are you using?

Hauppauge... As you said... pretty basic, but records at a good quality.