you could also get yourself a DVB-C (cable) card for your first split cable and use the direct .ts cable feed instead, but it seems you cant get a DVB-C with CAM that allows you to just plug in your payed for NTL smart-card and have it unscramble your NTL channels , shame that.
for now, mpeg2 will do, but in the near future its going to be AVC/H.264 encoding/decoding with everything,
the biggest problem right now seems to be the Hardware makers unwillingness to put a simple powerful and cheap FPGA re-programable chip on all their kit (along with a S-video in)so they/you could just write/port a working AVC/H.264 encoder/decoder and stuff anything through that unit to IP stream in AVC, so saving massive bandwidth.
perhaps your able to produce something and put a box/USB stick together and we might even be able to watch the avc HD decoded through that without messing with powerful CPU's/GPU's and expensive AVC/H.264 STB's just to watch the BBC HD
