the winTV tuner as well as most other cards kick ass for watching tv, but they all kinda suck when it comes to encoding and taping it

the problem is that most of these don''t allow you to use external video/audio encoders to do the taping on the fly (WME, VDuB/NANDuB)

the quality is so-so, it's just alot of annoying if you don't know what you're doing (telecining, interlacing, removing the artifacts of converting to progessive scan) just so you can output it to the TV with a card that transfers it back to those formats anyway.. big headache.... basically, with the price you'll be paying, just get the DVR or DVD-recorder