I just ordered the Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1600, which seems to be one of the more popular TV tuning cards, and it has hardware encoding of analog signals and can tune QAM digital signals with the right software. (I also ordered a DVI-to-HDMI cable so that I can hook the PC up to the TV.) I’m going to start by trying out the software that comes with it and free software like GB-PVR or Yahoo! Go.

If the free software doesn’t meet our needs, we may end up buying something like SageTV or Beyond TV.

If Charter starts adding more digital signals, and we find that we want more than one tuner, I’ve got my eye on the HDHomeRun, but that probably wouldn’t be added to our network for quite a while.