I will NOT buy a TIVO, because it is subject to blackout so when moviemakers decide they don't want a movie to be recorded, they can prevent you from doing so. They are not doing much of that yet but I'm sure it's coming. I have the s-video output of my direcTV receiver fed into a video capture card on my computer and I can record anything without them knowing it, and the quality is excellent. BUT, you do need to buy a high end capture card. I started with an el-cheapo ATI capture card and it was crap. The audio and video kept getting out of sync on a 3GHz P4. I switched to a Pinnacle brand card that does MPEG compression in hardware and all is well. Pinnacle is a professional class where ATI is a consumer class. If you want to see good comparisons of capture cards go to
www.videoguys.com
www.videoguys.com