So i have cut the cord and am using various websites for my shows i watch. And i have heard about this thing called xbmc and that it might have something like a dvr or pvr as some people call it. Anyone here have used it or running it?

I don't use it with a tuner card, but I run it as a media player. XBMCBuntu installed standalone on an AMD system. It works great. It works out of the box with the Windows media remote and keyboard also. It recognized just about every media type I've thrown at it so far. That's just the standalone. I can imagine that installed under windows it would be slower and more cumbersome as you would have the bottleneck that is Microsoft gooping things up.