TV Tuner Cards -- anyone have one?

[MyndFyre]

I have access to Windows Media Center Edition and am not ever home to watch my favorite episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 (I sound like a friggen commercial).  I want to be able to tape them.  Cable has autotune for me, but I want to be able to just have it run while I'm not home, and I don't have a VCR.

Does anyone know of any good, cheap TV tuner cards?  Or, anyone have a Media Center PC?

[shout]

You could use bittorrent to download them.

[MyndFyre]

You could use bittorrent to download them.

I've done that before, and while that's okay, the Entire DS9 collection is over 48 DVDs.  Generally 3-4 one-hour episodes fit on one disc, and there are 48 DVDs in that collection.  If a single episode of Alias takes me one night to download (another one-hour series) and I manage to get good seeds for every show, even the old ones (esp. since DS9 is a dead series), I'll run at 192 nights.

I need a better alternative.  Spike TV has 2 episodes on per day, and 3 episodes of TNG per day.  M*A*S*H has 4 episodes per day.  It would be easy to record these if I could just plug in.

[R.a.B.B.i.T]

PCWorld had a Top 10 of TV Tuner Cards a few months back.  I'll dig through my stack and see if I can find it for you.

In the meantime, I've heard good things about the ATI All-in-Wonder.  Not the cheapest cards, I'm sure, but very good.

[Zorm]

You can buy a Tivo for I believe around $99 or something now. With the new TivoToGo software you can download the episodes to burn them to a dvd or hack your tivo and extract them that way. It might be cheaper than buying a seperate TV Tuner card but I haven't really looked at what they cost.

[MyndFyre]

Sorry for the bump...

I ended up getting a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150 at CompUSA.  I wasn't going to get a WinTV card because of the price ($100), but at CompUSA I picked it up because it was marked at $70.

I went to take it up, and it rang up as $100.  I said, "Whoa whoa whoa, this was marked $70."

They said it was a tag error, but since it was their error they gave it to me. 

Works well, too.  Today I watched an episode of DS9 while TNG was recording. 

[Eric]

Tigerdirect has them all the way from $40 to $200.

[Newby]

I've got a spare PVR-250.

[MyndFyre]

I've got a spare PVR-250.

Want to send it to me and I can still return the 150 in the next 29 days? 

[Newby]

I've got a spare PVR-250.

Want to send it to me and I can still return the 150 in the next 29 days? 

Beh. I should have specified. You have to fine-tune it while it's working.

It's practically impossible to tune.

I'll get around to looking for it, and if I find it, I'll get in contact with you.