Hi there
I've owned several Analogue TV cards ie Generic Brooktree 484/478 cards and also currently use a Tevion Xpert SAA7134 (Philips chipset) card from Aldi (less than £25 with remote).
I also have a digital ariel installed and have never really gotten a good clean picture, maybe the new DVB-T (Freeview cards) are better. Most of the software for the TV cards was awful and I ended up using DScaler (freeware at Sourceforge) which is a brilliant app and works brilliantly, clean picture but your restricted to recording only 2GB at a time
I've used ChrisTV, BorgTV............the list could go on LOL......but Dscaler was the best.
Anyway this year I bought a PC Sat card (Skystar2) and once I got it working with my satellite dish, I haven't looked back. This is great if you have a movable dish as you can view encrypted channels with software emulators.
If you have a Sky dish your restricted to Astra 2 (Sky's platform) and there's a few channels available 'Free-to-air' but you'd more than likely be better off with a Freeview card instead.
Try to find one that allows you to MPHeg 5 (?) which is the 'Interactive' part of Freeview, if your in the market.
chrome