TVSquad

Looking for a cheap way to throw a second, third, or 17th TV tuner onto your media center PC? Newegg's selling the Plextor PX-TV100U for $39.99. But after a $30 rebate, you can pick this little guy up for under $10 (plus shipping).

The PX-TV100U is a USB 2.0 tuner, allowing you to record shows in MPEG-1/MPEG-2/DivX. The encoding is done through software, so you'll want a reasonably fast computer, and I wouldn't recommend picking up a dozen of these thinking that you can record 12 shows at once without crashing your PC.

You can also capture video from an analog video source like a camcorder or VCR through the PX-TV100U's composite and S-video inputs.

And if you don't already have PVR software on your computer, the unit comes bundled with SageTV Lite, which is, unsurprisingly, a stripped down version of SageTV.

Now if anybody could find a way to pick up this unit's big brother, the Plextor PX-TV402U for a similar prices, we'd be eternally grateful. The TV402U features hardware DivX encoding, meaning you can record standard definition programs straight to DivX through the tuner box, without putting any strain on your PC's CPU at all. The TV402U retails for around $200.