>The thing that is hard to find is a DVR that will record to HD or DVD and will copy back and forth between the HD and the DVD.
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>There are DVD recorders and DVRs that have a HD but for some reason the DVD Recorders with HDs ( Sony, Pioneer, Toshiba etc ) were taken off the market.

I still have one DVR/DVD rec with DVB-T from Panasonic. It is a *very* nice machine with software well equipped to fill basic needs for cutting out ads if you want to keep something. It writes to DVD-RAM as well, but was already from the time where they crippled the DV (which is Firewire) to only accept DV-In (good for reading your camera for instance). Nowadays mostly used to watch DVD's.
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>This Philips gizmo is cool. You can burn what is on the HD to DVD. Using firewire or RCA ports you can hook up a VCR and copy tapes to DVD or a video camera and burn DVDs from the camera. Just a nice combo of features with a very intuitive interface. Can watch a DVD while recording to HD or watch HD content while recording to HD or DVD.

They encode the already digital stream received again from the stream they encoded: can give you better compression, but why not just keep the already digital format ?

I miss LAN/USB/FW output ports on my combo (and one nearly every combo offered over here), and nowadays use a DVB-T receivers with USB ports for external disks and a LAN port. If I want to save anything, I record it, cut ads on one the desktops (here the Panasonic is slicker for heavy handed cuts - just don't want to look for the remote with the FFwrd button<g>), put it on my main server and can watch from there at any screen in the house. Same on the Pioneer HDMI mentioned below: WTF do they think to "offer" only in ports? If they want me to pay they should not invest brainpower to make it less usable! HD is still a few years off here in europe unless you go for Discs, and I watch less than 12 per year of those...

Piping the stuff anywhere is great if the kids want to watch Shrek again and I want some silence on my floor<bg>. Those DVB-T boxes draw very little power (linux based) and are good enough for my (not sophisticated) TV appetite.

my 0.02 EUR

thomas