Got the Mediasonic HW-150PVR, paid the extra $10 to get a metal cover and normal power cord instead of a wall wart.
It took a few tries formatting my external drive so I could record on it and then read the files on the PC, but it does work great, the menu system and remote do kind of suck, but the recordings are the same as what you see live.
VLC does confirm that the 1080i 60fps broadcasts are converted to 1080p 30fps. What is really cool is all the subtitle and audio streams are also saved.
Even though you can select pass through of the antenna signal, it doesn't seem to work when the unit is powered off, so I put a splitter and am feeding the TV and box their own signals, I have the HDMI from the box going to my receiver.