I was talking with my pops about DVR...

He says he can record 100hrs of clean footage on a piece of DVR hardware (for his dish) he bought for $100. Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to use it to capture digital footage.

There's got to be a way to hack it and attach a signal converter..

Any thoughts?

I'm sure that was a TIVO option added to his dish. That being the case, it's acceptable by the majority of cunsumers, but not for pros/semi-pros who need a robust signal to edit with. TIVO looks about the same to less then VHS. I can't imagine going back to that quality now.

There are plenty of ways of doing something similar directly on your computer, with enough hard drive space, but the quality is going to be the same unless you drop hundreds to thousands of dollars on specialized hardware.

That's what I thought.

When he said it was a perfect picture quality, I already had my doubts.

VHS quality? Ouch.

I have an HDDVR. The picture quality is perfect, but it cuts the capacity down to 30 hours

Is that built-in to your satelite service? Or a stand alone device? Can you store and edit at your will or do you have to only record broadcast? The big question... does it have a firewire output? The last would allow for transfer to a computer, probably as a transfer stream, that could then be de-muxed, edited, muxed and then transfered back to the HD-DVR. If it does all this, I would love to know where/how much...
Thanx for the input!

The Tivo Recorder does not have VHS quality. It's encoder is pretty good and would equate it to around SVHS quality in a side by side comparison.