(OT) How do DVRs work?

[George]

Why not? Every DVR I know of has OTA capability.

Not much point of saving to DVD except maybe if you want to give a copy to someone. The whole niceness of a DVR is you get to move away from the limited and tedious VCR concept of having to have stacks of media that you manually change.

No cable necessary. The various do it yourself versions and windows media center all can use a tuner such as a Happauge card which will receive OTA TV allowing you to even record two programs at the same time if you use a dual version. I know tivo can record OTA too.

[gfretwell]

That is what a capture card will do for you. They are pretty cheap. You can even get one with a tuner in it fairly reasonable these days.

The advantage of the Replay TV over just about any DVR is you can transfer straight to the PC in an MPEG file that DVD burners can use. You can use Womble or some other editor to crop out the commercials.

Look at AVS Forum for all the details.

[chaniarts]

the newer ones do if you subscribe to the road alert service. it can get realtime info on road traffic and reroute accordingly.

i have a tomtom that i bought for a trip to italy. when you're presented with a roundabout with 7 exits, each having a signpost for between 4 and

10 different towns, non-english advisement signs, and high traffic, it's wonderful to be told 'take the 3rd exit'. my previou trip to italy had me going around the roundabouts a few times before i could figure out where to get spit out.

[chaniarts]

there are products that can do this. they're not cheap. you want a video capture card or usb adapter.

[chaniarts]

backup. you've never had a hard disk crash, or run out of foom, i would expect.

[Ron]

Not much point? How about if you record an NFL game for example that you want to KEEP a copy of?

[krw]

My Magellan tells you what sort of intersection and which exit to use but it's often wrong (a "slight right" is often not slight or even a right). I bought it because it had the larger display and voice directions, when these were quite expensive options in the Garmin or Tomtom line. Well, it paid for itself [*] but it does piss me off, at times.

[*] I bought it for my wife when we moved to a large city. She has a *terrible* sense of direction and can't read a map to the garage.

[George]

Or just unsafe, inconvenient and time wasting. I was on a highway in an unfamiliar area. My exit was closed because of an accident. There were no shoulders. If I had a map I wouldn't be able to use it and if I was going on guesswork I likely would have turned off at the next exit. Except that would have given me a 15 mile trip the wrong way.

As soon as the GPS saw I blew past the exit it suggested the second exit ahead. That put put me on a local street I didn't know but it knew a route. If I had a map I would have still been going the wrong way after taking the first exit and then looking at a little postage stamp detail of the area to find a route.

[George]

That is built in to MythTV. I can even tell it to automatically remove the commercials it already detected. Unfortunately it has the same issues as replay because it intentionally won't work with a cable card as directed by the upstream providers.

[George]

Yes, backup. The same way you deal with stuff on any computer. Don't care casual stuff doesn't get backed up. Hard drive space is incredibly inexpensive.

[gfretwell]

You can do a lot better than that

$51

[Ed Pawlowski]

"chaniarts" wrote

I'm going again in two weeks. I bought a new Garmin to take this time. Overall, I found the roads well marked and m wife is good at reading maps. This model has "lane assist" that gives you a little graphic of the exit ahead of time. It may do the same for roundabouts. This should make it easier yet. I expect to drive about 2000 miles at $8.50 a gallon. I'll spend more on gas than wine and gelato!

[Ed Pawlowski]

"George" wrote

But does it have a channel guide? That is the beauty of a system on cable or sat. You can browse the guide and choose your shows to record. You can set up series recordings and if there is a conflict, it can record the other program at a later time. The channel guide has information about the program, the actors, when it was first shown, and more.

[gfretwell]

The Tivo and Replay machines have a guide as part of the service. (replay just extended their service after threatening to drop it) There are also ways to get a guide off the internet for PC based systems.

[George]

Agree, the channel guide is a key part of the goodness of a DVR. Tivo, Windows media and MythTV all have guides.

[George]

Better because of price only? Those USB tuner encoder things are notoriously crappy. It doesn't make a lot of sense to save a couple bucks to buy poor performance.

[trader4]

I think the point of confusion here is that the channel guide is not necessarily linked to cable or sat. For example, Tivo obtains the channel guide and software updates via an ethernet connection with newer units and via dial up modem with the older units. That guide will work with antenna, cable, or sat. In the case of ethernet, it's true that for many people that ethernet is then connected to the cable system internet, but could also be DSL.

I also think that the versatility of the DVR is greatly compromised without having the

100+ channels cable or sat offers. The ability to search and manage a huge amount of programming is a key part of Tivo. If I only had antenna, not sure I'd even want one. Actually, given what I watch, I wouldn't be watching much at all.

[gfretwell]

>

That was just the first hit I had with a name brand. The point is, shop around. I got a full featured card and software from one of the internet outlets for $60.

[Peter]

Magnavox makes hard disk/DVD digital video recorders. I've been using one for almost 2 years to record OTA programs when I want to time shift. In addition to the built-in ATSC tuner, it has several aux inputs, including a composite video jack, which could be used to record the output of your VCR. It has RF, HDMI, S-video, component, and composite video output jacks, so you can connect it to any TV, analog or digital. You can record either to the built in hard drive or to a recordable DVD. You can also dub from either medium to the other and can do primitive editing. Although there is no program guide capability, I am not put out by checking tvguide.com and setting the DVR manually. (Maybe because I'm old enough that I was doing that with VCR's since 1980 and is something I am used to doing.) Use your favorite search engine to see which models are currently available. Last time I checked, there are models sold by web retailers for < $200. It may not be the perfect solution for you, but it may be better than any alternatives you've considered.

[Congoleum Breckenridge]

Just get a EchoStar TR-50 DVR