[Rich A]

For example .. (I'll get the technical end of this gong)

Which would give us the final better quality recorded video?

A true "digital tuner" ? Or feeding the S-video from a tuner box to our current mpeg encoders?

I "think" the digital tuner might blow away the S-video. As it is my thought that a future digital cable ready PC tuner is going to work like our current OTA digital tuners. No encoding required. Just write the transport stream as found directly to the hard drive. If this is so, then we may be looking at "inexpensive" digital/cable tuners as they wouldn't need any mpeg encoding hardware or firmware. This might be a "good" thing no?

Using the S-video output of a cable box, I think would produce far less quality final mpeg files. Because the original pristine digital signal will be decoded to an S-video signal and then EN-coded by our PVR-x50 back to an mpeg format. I just don't think it will compare at all to dropping the original mpeg transport stream directly to the hard drive. The question is exactly what is a QAM capable digital cable stream? Is it like an OTA transport stream?