[lsilvest]

If you're only concerned with OTA, all you need is a basic ATSC tuner. I use an ATI HDTV Wonder and Avermedia 180 MCE and both work perfectly with OTA. You'll see a lot of Hauppage cards listed on here also and NewEgg has a good selection an occasional sales (I got the AverMedia there for $39.00).

BTV only records Mpeg-2 transport streams for OTA. Your file size will vary (per hour) from 8G to around 4.5G for HD and as low as 1.5G for SD. It all depends on the feed and how many subs are in each stream. BTV does do showsqueezing as you know and will reduce these files to a little over 1G for high quality that will look fine on your TV. In fact, I've played some squeezed files that don't look bad on my 42" plasma. Your system specs are borderline for good HD, but if you squeeze everything you shouldn't have a problem.