TVSquad

Once upon a time turning your old PC into a homemade personal video recorder was a snap. All you had to do was buy a TV tuner card for about $100, plug in an analog TV cable, and use some free or commercial software to start recording shows. But the TV landscape is a bit more complicated these days, and if you have digital cable, HDTV, satellite TV, or other newfangled doohickeys hooked up to your TV, you might not even know where to begin.

Missing Remote has put together an excellent primer on choosing the right video source for your PVR. For example, if you want to record over-the-air HDTV using a digital antenna, you can use pretty much any modern TV tuner. But if you want to record the unencrypted HDTV signals your cable company sends out as well as standard definition digital cable channels, you're probably going to want something a bit more specialized, like Silcon Dust's HDHomeRun for the HDTV, and a second tuner with an S-Video port and an IR blaster to record and change the channels on your digital cable box.

Of course, there's a lot more to building a PVR than choosing the right TV tuner. You also need to choose the right software package, make sure you have enough hard drive space, and make sure your video card can support your display. But in end, your video quality is only going to be as good as your TV tuner.