I've tried out the Scientific Atlanta Explorer PVR for TW digital cable. It's like tivo, but has dual digital cable tuners which makes it better than the ir blasted tivo we have. However, it's unhackable (industrial encryption, plus I don't own the box).

The shows are already recorded in high-quality mpeg (no user settings) -- but there's no way to get the raw files out except through the video outs.

So here's the rub, double compression artifacts as you guys must know. If I use any capture device, I will be compressing the stream twice. The recording quality is excellent, I can't tell the difference between digital cable and recorded, but artifacts are likely to be exaggerted in the second round of capturing.

My first choice would be a cheaper s-video capture card ~$100 with mpeg encoding -- but those haven't gotten good reviews here. Unless any of you can tell me, there are some good s-video capture cards, I'll reluctantly skip them.

Before I chunk down some cash on a ADC-1000 or DAC-100, will it be worth it?

First there's the time to capture the shows, then there's the enormous files created, then's there's the massive CPU cycles to turn it back into MPEGs for SVCD/DVD/HMS -- and then the quality might not even be worth looking at!

Do you think there's any hope? Or should I just buy another tivo/replayTV/PCPVR to go with our other cable box for dual show recordings.