The world moved on

Once content becomes a file, you can treat it like any other file.

The issue with content these days is the vendors who want you to believe you have rented it.

ts

apes

It is almost certainly cheaper to buy a VCR than to fix one. As for DVR, you can put movies on a thumb drive (flash), but each movie is usually about 4GB, (which can be limiting, in terms of dollars/GB). Why not just burn them off to DVD's, once you get them in file format?

As I said, "My wife records her Soaps and carries them between home and work, so tapes are nice." (self employed so she can watch as business permits) Soo.... it would be nice just to set the dvr to record Mon-Fri and let her swap the thumb drives in and out. I don't know that the idea is feasable, but I don't know why not. Mikek

DVR with a DVD+RW drive. Record, watch, re-use disc.

I have an old Panasonic with a VCR, writeable DVD drive, digital OTA tuner.

Or, if you're feeling adventuresome:

r.

Why bother with the DVD-R? Big disc drives are almost free nowadays - a terabyte for $70. We watch a big chunk of TV across the LAN here. The 55" LCD linked to the PC via HDMI looks really good. OR, are you expecting to actually make a DVD to play on any DVD player? That seems like more work to me.

G=B2

I want the media portable and easy to get data to, like a video tape. Thumb drive seems perfect. Probably not a good idea to transport a hardrive twice a day. (as he waits for a harddrive to arrive to replace the drive that died in his laptop). Mikek Mikek

What you need:

and a USB stick.

The OP wanted something his wife could take to work. A DVD, thumb drive or external USB drive should work with most PCs. If the goal is to play on a stand-alone player, DVD (with certain restrictions on the +/-RW subtype) would be best.

I'd go with the MythTV solution. Many commercial recorders cripple USB/SD card interfaces so as not to upset the MPAA.