Okay, so if I have the AirStar HD card in my system (it looks like it does NOT have a video output, so I'll use the onboard Nvidia card), AND I also want a Hauppauge PVR card (for the digital cable STB), here's my question:

Do I want/need the PVR-350 with the mpeg playback?

And, if I do that, do I have to use THAT card to playback the video (what happens to the on-board Nvidia card?) Do I disable the onboard one at that point?

My guess is that since the AirStar HD has no hardware MPEG encoding or decoding, I'll have to rely on the CPU, so that's why I was thinking about using the PVR-350 in case I needed to record two things at once (one HD and one "regular").

But I'd rather use the onboard Nvidia because it has DVI output to my HDTV.

I might suggest a PVR-150 or PVR-250 for recording SDTV, but since you won't be able to playback the HDTV content throught the PVR-350 that's a waste. You're probably better off with uniform playback setup through the video card.

As for ATSC HDTV cards, they capture a pre-encoded MPEG2 stream. Decoding the stream for playback can be rather CPU intesive, but at least you don't have to worry about encoding it.

Great, thanks!