Wanting to confirm something

[extremefire]

We just went and upgraded to digital cable today, and I am also thinking about ditching our ATI tuner card for a Hauppauge hardware encoding card, and I was wanting to confirm a couple of things.

Since I'll be settings the channel to 4 indefinitely to receive the signal from the cable box, I am better of quality wise just hooking it up using s-video. Will the WinTV-150 card still do the hardware encoding even through the s-video connector?? Didn't see in say directly one way or the other. And will I need to geet the A/V header board SS sells to get the audio for the board to encode?

Is their a chance that I can run the WinTV board and the ATI software encoding board both at the same time?? Believe my current tuner card is an TV Wonder VE card.

Didn't find much information on the Motorola DCT2500 cable box yet, but does anyone know if you can serial connect it like earlier models?? Got a tech support question into both Cox & Motorola, just haven't heard back from them yet.

Thanks.