VCR alternatives for recording TV shows

It's been brought to my attention that a replacement to the otherwise perfectly fine VCR had better show up under the Christmas tree this year. Sigh, bad enough I finally knuckled under and retired the converter box that kept the cathode ray TV going.

So, to any of you troglodytes who, like me, still watche free TV over the air, what sort of devices for recording shows have you found to work well, and be pretty cheap?

If it matters, I do have a Samsung smart TV now, and the worlds slowest DSL internet connection. Computer, Apple piddlepad and some smart phones too. I'm not totally hopeless, I have finally figured out how to stream a youtube video from the phone to the TV. Which works much better than trying to do it directly from the TV to the internet via the wifi router.

TiVo?

Tivo & similar are the easy solution, they'll let you record & play back to the TV. If you want something that'll let you move the recorded video files around freely, you'll need a custom solution that's way harder than streaming video from a phone

TiVo still exists?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BFIJQ10/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

We bought two of these as digital converters when we cut our cable last year. They have a built-in DVR function that uses USB flash drive memory.

It's a little more cumbersome to use than the DVR from our old cable box, but you can't beat it for the money.

I made a DVR out of an old PC, a tuner card and a big hard drive. Works well and cost around $250 with no sort of ongoing subscription fees.

I have an old video capture card that you can play with if you want it

Hmm. The son might be interested in playing with a video card or such and a computer, but the wife would hate that. She will demand it be a thingie with a button or remote. And ahh, can't say her husband would disagree with her. Let me take your thoughts, and your offer tuna55, and go bounce them off the wife and boy.

I kinda like the notion of a cheap converter box/recorder. But when I switched to a digital TV I was surprised at how many more channels I could get with the TV that the box never saw. That_Renault_Guy, have you found that with yours?

I did go looking at Tivo stuff, and I see I'm supposed to want the Roamio since it does over the air (OTA, see, I'm learning the terms!). What I can't figure out is if I can use it without paying the Tivo subscription fee. You would think that would be easy to figure out, but I can understand why Tivo wouldn't want me to use it without a subscription.

Simple. Build a Home Theater PC with a remote. Not terribly hard to do, I've built my fair share. With the proper software and hardware, you can easily add DVR capability. I can provide more details if you'd like. Biggest issue with them is that they are essentially PC's running PC hardware and software so they are liable to have bugs and require updates from time to time, which can be rather annoying for the not so technically inclined.

A good first test would be setup a laptop connected to the TV via DVI/VGA/HDMI with a simple USB DVR dongle connected to an antennae. Most DVR solutions come with fairly basic PC software that would allow you to tune into various channels and record them. From there you add automation via software, a USB remote control receiver and a 10-foot interface solution so you can control it from your couch without squinting.

http://www.tomsguide.com/forum/59416-4-making-home

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pQel9sSdG0

Biggest issue is that thanks to the DMCA getting anything into the PC or DVR has to be done so without the encryption typically used in HDMI, especially from Cable boxes and the like. Over the Air HDTV is unencrypted luckily so you just need something to capture the information from your antennae, convert that into digital information and record this information onto a storage medium. There are off the shelf solutions available for this for a reasonable price and many include remote controls and basic software to schedule the recordings, etc.

http://www.wired.com/2014/09/simple-tv/

Well you could build a computer box and use this as the input. I think it has composite in as well as a few other things, but it's been a while. Let me know if you want it.

foxtrapper wrote: I kinda like the notion of a cheap converter box/recorder. But when I switched to a digital TV I was surprised at how many more channels I could get with the TV that the box never saw. That_Renault_Guy, have you found that with yours?

Unfortunately, I can't answer that, since the converter box was actually required for me - I'm probably the only person left that doesn't own a flat screen TV.

I can say that I was surprised by how many free channels did show up (around 30).

I don't have a flat screen TV either. We use a large CRT which came with our house (they didn't want to move it, and we left it where it was).

I use a tv only torrent site if I don't want to wait (or hope) that it shows up on netflix. I then run the shows off an external HD via the tv's USB or through my 360/ps3 (depending what tv i'm watching on).

back in the 2000ish timeframe, you could walk into the closest big box store and buy a standalone dvr unit that worked like a vcr and didn't require any supscription fees... they disappeared off the shelves as soon as Tivo showed up..

around that time, i had a tuner card in my Win98 PC with 128MB of memory and 10GB hard drive and was able to record shows on it and watch on my tv with quality that was on par with the almost top of the line Sony VCR that i bought a few years earlier..