Tivo basic Roamio has both Cable card and Off Air options, plus its a dvr. 

Like others, we go with the channel master but honestly there is maybe one or two installs a year so we have not tested any of the more recent PVRs.

as a side note

recently I have heard of (have not tried it) Tablo [Link: tablotv.com] that looks a bit interesting. There is a 4 tuner model and it can stream to multiple (up to 6) displays at a time. What bugs me (and so still questioning) is that it can only stream (no AV out) so there is a fear on my part of possible diminished quality

i.e. from their own FAQ "We record a single stream at the resolution the user selects (1080p, 720p or SD). When you are not on your home network we do adaptive bit rate encoding that measures the bandwidth available over the internet or cell network and adjusts the bit rate dynamically to provide the best possible picture." now they talk about streaming off your network but I can't imagine that if the bitrate is not there on your home network it won't do the same, and any of our clients that go OTA it is all about getting that better AV since all of them also have cable/sat or fiber TV.

Yeah, I just heard about Tablo the other day... and I have to agree, I'd want to know if it keeps the original MPEG2 stream for local streaming, or if absolutely everything is transcoded/degraded.

At minimum, it sounds like there's no way to get "native" resolution. 720p will be upscaled, or 1080i will be downscaled. Speaking of 1080i, they only mention 1080p. So what kind of deinterlacing are they doing? How do they handle 3:2 pulldown?

don't know, according to their FAQ

"You can record/playback at the same quality coming out of your antenna, or choose to save storage space and record at lower quality."

I would hope that it means you can choose to save in the original encode (and not a "good quality" re-encode that someone decided is the same quality as your antenna), but in the end that is only half the equation. If it streams it to the device will it stream it as is or would it re-encode it at that time (obviously it can do live re-encode from the previous FAQ answer)

Just did some more searching

[Link: support.tablotv.com]

We transcode ATSC MPEG 2 to H.264. We currently transcode the AC3 to two channel AAC but hope to add an AC3 pass through in the near future.

so everything is re-encoded

Eh, not so thrilled about that. Especially losing 5.1 sound.

Does the HD HomeRun stream the original MPEG2 or is it forced transcoding too? Not that they have a DVR model.

I wish I had asked about this before CEDIA- I would have made some excuses to go.

I think it depends on how you view the stream (and maybe which product you are using, I'm using the HDHomerun Prime). I 'think' that if you are viewing the stream via an xbox360 (or a media center extender) thru Window's MCE you are getting a 'direct' stream, indirectly, if that makes any since.
If you are viewing the stream via an android app or via a windows app you are going to get transcoding (and that usually requires an app running on your windows server) but it does depend on which app.
Like, if you use the Tune N' View app for GTV (which I do) you are using a direct stream from the tuner but I believe very few apps use the direct stream. Basically, you can tell if they are using the direct stream by looking at the setup process. If using the direct stream, the setup process will search and find the HD tuner on the network during setup.
Bottom line, there are a lot of combinations, tuner being used, server (if any), server software, app software, viewing device. Also, very hard/expensive to get true HD via wireless so if wireless, that's usually a clue that it's transcoded.