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Recently, I have started looking for way to capture HDTV from my satellite system to my media center pc. Unfortunately, after much googling I have been unable to find any solution which will work with a media center pc.

Options I have looked at so far

1. Tuner card which can be directly connected to the dish. This would allow a direct capture of the mpeg 2 stream coming from the dish itself, no encoding / decoding required. Unfortunately, this will not work at the moment because no tuner card exists which will do this.
2. Capture the signal from the DVI output on the satellite receiver. This idea would not be as nice as the above idea, because it would a) still require satellite recievers, and b) still require an IR blaster to change channels. Unfortunately, this option is not available either, because there are no inexpensive tuner cards which can capture and encode a DVI signal.
3. Over the air HD. This may be an option, but may or may not be possible for a couple reasons. The first reason is that I have to install an antenna outside or in the attic. Also, if I finish installing an antenna, I may not even get many channels, since Waterloo is at the fringe of coverage.
4. Hack the receiver to have firewire output. Media center has a hack which will enable tuning via firewire, however this would require that I hack my receiver to have a firewire output which is active. Once this is enabled, using firewire is not as elegant as the tuning solution I currently have. This is because the hack for media center essentially records the stream from the s-video connection and the firewire at the same time, then swaps the firewire recorded file with the one recorded from the tuner after the fact. This rules out the technique we have of watching some shows 15 minutes after it’s started to record, so that we can skip all commercials.
5. Switch to another tv provider.  Unfortunately, none of them allow capture either.  The closest I have seen so far is Bell Express VU, with a DVB-S card.  Unfortunately, Bell encrypts their signals so that a DVB-S card with bell express vu smart card will not work.
6. Wait for cable card support, and a Canadian Provider to support it.  Currently, this option is no good either, because at the moment, none of the Canadian providers support cable card.  Even if they did, only pc’s from trusted vendors will have cable card tuners, and the home brew media center group is out of luck.

For the moment, it appears that I am out of luck, and will have to wait for HD.