Help with TV card choice

[wadeall]

Having been a member of this group for a couple of weeks i'm still a bit confused as to what kit I need to set up a GBPVR system.

My situation is that I am in the UK and currently get my TV via Freeview which I run via a Humax PVR/set top box into my TV via a scart lead.

I've got a 1 year old PC running a 2500+ AMD Athlon processor in my lounge and have just ordered a dual dvi head graphics card which should allow me to connect bioth my LCD TV and my PC's monitor to my PC.

What I want to achieve is better picture quality on my LCD TV combined with a capability of both watching and recording digital TV at the same time.

From what I can gather on this forum, the Hauppage 150 PVR cards seem the most preferred soluition, but these are analogue cards. As far as I can see I need a digital card but I have also gathered that you get a much better picture with a hardware based rather than software based decoder. As far as I can see, most of the digital cards which are compatible with GBPVR offer software based decoding.

So what is the best/most reasonably priced hardware based digital card i can buy??

Sorry for the newbie ness of the question, but any heklp gratefully received.

Wade

[sub]

From what I can gather on this forum, the Hauppage 150 PVR cards seem the most preferred soluition, but these are analogue cards. As far as I can see I need a digital card but I have also gathered that you get a much better picture with a hardware based rather than software based decoder. As far as I can see, most of the digital cards which are compatible with GBPVR offer software based decoding.

The PVR150 etc have a hardware MPEG2 ENcoder. With digital cards, the MPEG2 encoding is done by the broadcaster prior to transmission. Neither provide any hardware decoding.

A lot of UK users seem to go with the Hauppauge Nova-T devices.

[danielpugh]

twinhan is good and ci supports top up tv. there are problems with dual cards in all pvr software, but that wont be long. i am about to install compro videomate t300 alongside. this is a hybrid digital analogue card that also supports remote control power on/off and will also provide hw mpeg2 encoding

word of warning ... its not plugged in yet as i want to get 2 twinhans working together first