I've worn out 2+ vcr's over the years time shifting programs (lifetime total is probably under 15 rented tapes). When the current vcr started to go (that's the + in 2+
) I wanted to go digital. The home dvd recorders were still too pricey last year and I wanted maximum programmability and flexibility so I replaced my cd burner in my PC with a dvd burner (paid $100 about 1.5 years ago and now of course they are over twice as fast and half the cost
) and bought a Hauppage brand WINTV board. My video card does not have svideo output so I got the WINTV-350 for about $180. This has a cable ready tv tuner, fm radio tuner, hardware mpeg compression in about 10 different modes, resolutions, and file sizes, and hardware decompression and svideo output (so it doesn't slow down surfing tb.com at all while recording or playing back
). Also stepped up to a 100 GB hard drive for $80 after Best Buy's sale price and rebate. Hauppage also has the WINTV-250 for about $130 that doesn't do hardware decoding and outputs through the pc video card for people that just want to watch on their monitor or have cards with ntsc video out. I played with all the modes and settled on what they call extra long play DVD. This takes about 1.6 GB per hour and I have to really hunt for an occasional difference between live and recorded on a pretty good resolution 32" tv. I was always frustrated by only having 8 program slots on my vcr since I like to keep all the weekly shows I want to record always in the program list. The Hauppage scheduler doesn't seem to have any limits on how many events you can program in, but it is pretty clunky to set up. My "old" pc is a pentium III 1000 MHz, which is plenty fast enough for what I do (record to a file, watch it later, delete the file), and I could have just stayed with my old 15 GB hard drive but would have always had to have been moving files to dvd or deleting old ones. Anyway, a new pc would most likely have a large enough hard drive and maybe a dvd burner so the cost would be $130 minimum, maybe $350 max if you need to get everything. It comes with a limited version of ULEAD dvd burning software but I bought NERO and really like it. So far I've only actually burnt 4-5 dvds of programs I recorded for friends or wanted to keep for myself, and transferred one video tape to dvd. The hardware compression is really nice - a friend bought a cheaper brand with software compression and on his 500 MHz PII it required literally 8 hours to compress a 2 hour video tape. Oh, the wintv350 has svideo and composite video out, left and right audio in/out, antenna, composite, and svideo in. YMMV but I'm obviously really happy.
www.hauppage.com for all the details, and I'm a satisfied customer of
www.newegg.com after lots of price shopping online.
