I was recently in a CompUSA store looking at their selection of video capture devices and found one that I really liked. It was a USB 2.0 based device, which I found interesting since I have always used PCI video capture cards in the past. This particular product was called the Hauppage WinTV-PVR-USB2. I was pretty sure that it didn't work using Linux but I sure did wish it would because it looked like exactly what I was looking for - a product that I could use with a laptop computer to let me do my video capturing directly into a compressed MPEG format without having to go through the large AVI file intermediary. In addition, I noticed that the windows software that came with this device basically performs a TIVO-like functionality, hence the name PVR for Personal Video Recorder. The thing that appealed to me about the device is how simple the software appeared to be to use. If you are watching TV on whatever channel, you just click one button and it will begin recording whatever you are watching. Wow, could I actually do this on a linux laptop?