VDR

Video Disk RecorderWith the availability of high capacity hard disks and MPEG encoders/decoders the idea of a fully digital video recorder comes to mind.

Meanwhile there are several commercial products on the market that implement this functionality. Some of these systems are mainly targeted at working together with special services provided by the system manufacturer, which offer the consumer a personalized recording strategy - and sometimes are available only at extra costs. The downside of these systems is often the lack of a really flexible "timer recording" facility, and the manufacturers' tendencies to implement new ways of imposing advertisements on the viewer (since it would become too easy to skip the commercial breaks). They also don't support what one would expect to come natural with digital recording: on-disk editing. And finally they won't let you get access to the actual recorded digital data (for instance for archiving).