How to get HD content on your PC

The good news is that options exist for users of all three major operating systems to watch and record high-def programs, and new services are cropping up all the time to constantly expand the slate of offerings. PC owners today can pull HD signals directly to their machines with capture cards or USB peripherals; HDBeat recommends devices with MPEG-2 hardware encoding to ease the strain on your processor, and QAM support if you're piping in cable through Firewire from a STB (although many channels are encrypted and can be neither viewed nor captured). Another option is hacking your HDTiVo to open up it's USB 1.1 port for output, but this method is both slow and of questionable legality.