My internal Hauppauge card (WinTV-PVR250) can record up to DVD resolution (720x480). It has hardware MPEG-2 encoding, so you're not using up your CPU resources to to the encoding.
As for the USB capture boxes, Hauppauge makes a few different models. Their high end model (
WinTV-PVR USB2) also has the hardware MPEG-2 encoder. It's specs are very similar to the internal card that I own. (720x480, etc.)
The low-end model that I mentioned in my previous posts, is mainly intended to be used to watch TV. Although you can record AVI files with it. It is mainly intended for short clips. Because the 4:2:2 video sampling rate they use can result in very large files.
I used to be indecisive, but now I'm not so sure...