I have been liking my Hauppauge TV tuners. Hauppauge arguably makes the best tuners on the market in terms of reliability.
Tuners for Desktop PC come in PCI and PCI-e flavors. Tuners for laptops are USB. They come Regular and HDTV.
Beware of the claim that these cards are "dual tuner" and can record one show while watching another (or record two shows at once). While technically correct - there are 2 tuners on the card - it would only apply if you had 2 different TV sources, something most of us would not do. One tuner on the card is for Analog TV signals - either from Cable or over the air(NTSC format), and the other tuner is for Digital TV signals - either from Cable, FiberO, or Other (ATSC/ClearQAM formats). Bottom line is that if you want to record two shows at once you need 2 cards. Very few cable systems use NTSC anymore.
Your Tuner is the hardware that turns your PC into a TV, but you still need software to use it. The card you buy will come with software - Hauppage uses WinTV. I don't recommend WinTV other than to set up the card for initial use (Great tuners-Horrible Software!). There are many TV programs to choose from but you want to be sure the software has your tuner card on it's qualified hardware list. I have been using SageTV for years and like it. And there is always Windows Media Center.
If you are looking at other brands of TV tuners steer clear of any that do not do hardware encoding (encoding on the card). These use the PC's resources and can slow down the system. Worse, normal use of your PC can fudge your recordings with errata. Cards that do everything on their own can run without a hitch in very old systems - Like an old P4 that I use as a dual tuner PVR.
Hope that helps.
