Is there a hard drive equivalent to a VCR? What I want is a device that can record video from say, RCA cables, record it to a hard drive, then spit the video back out to a TV. It’d be similar to a TiVo I suppose, or a capture card in a PC.
Does this exist?
Any hard drive can record video. As you indicated, you would need a capture card to transfer the video/audio to your hard drive. There are video cards which allow you to do this, or you can get an external USB capture device that will do the same thing. You will also need a video card that has either composite video or s-video output to go to your tv.
Sorry, what I meant to ask was if there was an all-in-one box unit that could do what I wanted, like a Tivo (in fact, a Tivo would be perfect, but I don’t think it has RCA inputs).
You can buy adapters to convert coax to RCA, and some of the capture cards for PCs have digital video inputs.
TiVo does, in fact, have an RCA input. It’s meant to be used for a cable box or satellite receiver, but if you hook up a PS2 or something, TiVo won’t know the difference.