Help Old Fogey With DVD Burner Question

Apparently I missed the class where they mentioned DVD players/burners for televisions are obsolete.

I have a DVR, and tape lots of shows for friends in Germany. When I get enough shows together, I would slap in a blank DVD disk in my DVD player/recorder - make a copy, send it off and friends could watch in Germany.

Well, the DVD burner/player (television component model) died, so I went to my local Walmart (where I bought this one several years ago) to buy a new one.
“We don’t sell those machines anymore.”
Huh?

So I did a search on Google and, wow - I can’t even find any of those machines!

So now I have a bunch of shows on my DVR that I need to transfer to a DVD disk.
I assume there is a better faster way to do this now, with different technology - but I am clueless. Ya miss one technology class and yer screwed, I tell ya!

What hardware/software do I need to get in order to copy shows I have on my DVR to a a DVD disk? (The cheaper the alternative, the better!)

Does your DVR still play? What do you mean when you say it died?

I don’t know what you are saying about dvd recorders being obsolete. There are plenty on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/DVD-Recorders-Players-Audio-Video/b?ie=UTF8&node=1036920

No, it is the DVD burner that died. DVR works fine.

Amazon…duh, stupid me never thought to look there. A Google search was not all that successful for me. I thought this weekend I would go hit a few of the bigger electronic stores (Fry’s is one locally) and see what they have.

I guess I was just wondering how others copy shows they have on DVR to DVD - it is really convenient and easy to send DVD’s to friends in Germany. Televisions and DVD players now seem able to play all formats, so they can watch shows I send them and I can watch shows they send me.

See if you can find a DVR with a tuner. Then you can skip the DVR to DVD step. I have an older one, but the DVD aren’t too compatible, so I end up running it through DvdShrink and reburning to get something that works on other DVD players.

For stuff I actually want to keep, I reencode it as Divx to save on space. It might save you some postage if your friends can play Divx. My Philips DVD player plays Divx.

Thanks for the ideas!

I’ve been trying to educate myself about DVRs. Can you expand a little further on what these two sentences mean? It makes no sense to me.

Google “DVD recorder HD” and “DVD recorder harddisk”
Link

I have a DVD recorder that has a built in tuner, so you can set it to record a show at a given time just like an old VCR. You can also set the quality of the recording so you can get 1, 2, 4 or 6 hours of recording on 1 DVD. This might be less useful if you don’t have cable. I don’t know if there is a DVD recorder with an HD tuner.

I have a USB HD tuner that lets me record over the air HD shows on my computer in the Windows Media Center. These files are huge (3.5GB for a half hour show), but I can edit out the commercials in Windows Movie Maker and reencode it at DVD quality to reduce it to 500mb if I want to keep it. This works on Vista, but I seem to recall you can’t do it on Windows 7 for some reason.

OK, I understand your last post. What I don’t understand is what you said before:
“See if you can find a DVR with a tuner. Then you can skip the DVR to DVD step.”
If you have a DVR without a tuner, how does that add an extra step to the process?

Sorry I meant a DVD recorder with a tuner. The original post was about recording on a DVR and then playing it back to copy it to a DVD recorder. This not only introduces an extra step, but will cause some quality degradation, since the usual way to copy from DVR to DVD is a S-Video connection, which is analog.

Now I get it! I’m slow, but with time I can catch up with the rest.

Are your programs on a satellite DVR, a Cable Company DVR, or an over-the-air DVR (like the DTV Pal DVR)?

Some programs have CPRM built into them with a “Copy Once” flag, which means you can record them to a hard disc and watch them, but the DVD recorder won’t let you record the program that’s already on the hard drive to a DVD disc.