I'm fond of the HDHomerun devices. They just expose a set of URLs over the local network corresponding to channels. You can point VLC to them or just download

I'm fond of the HDHomerun devices. They just expose a set of URLs over the local network corresponding to channels. You can point VLC to them or just download a chunk of the bitstream to process later. I'm sure you could appliance that up to trigger an automatic recording on conditions like "card inserted".