Prez808, I will be recording with my Media Center with recording quality set at "highest" rate is unknown, file will be in .DVR-MS which I will convert to .mpg with GraphEdit with no quality loss (as far as I understand there's no re-encoding), then cut out commericals and re-save to .mpg (again, no re-encoding involved) and finally encode to Divx5 with Dr. Divx at 900kbps for video and either 96kbps or 112kbps for audio. Resolution will be slightly sized down to keep the file size down (usually 512x384, around 290MB for one-hour show).
again, my TV capture card isnt anything fancy, it's a Sony MPEG card that came with my VAIO, overall quality is pretty good but no match compare to other capture cards. For TV recording I feel it gets the job done pretty well.
My plan is to keep the size down as much as possible without losing too much quality, to make sharing easier/faster. If you are planning to keep a high-quality copy, you might be slightly disappointed