Home audio & video forum: Best recorder VHS to HDD ?

This is the route I ended up taking, Haap WinTv card and my VCR, after looking into the best long term approach, but my target was a HTPC that will be the hub of everything, but that is another story.

The main drawback to a PC and card is that you really tie up your PC, so if this a a casual deal, few tapes then fine, but unless as I did, you can pretty much dedicate a PC to it then converting his collection will take a very long time.

On the other point, format conversion, it adds a lot of time depending on the horsepower of your PC, so one of my goals was the same as his, I did not want to have to convert to other formats for how I was going to use them the most, and in my case that was watching it through WMC along as well as whatever I record these days from TV, using the WinTV card.

I also use VideoReDo, for my application, most cut edits (removing commercials) it is a great app! I use its auto-scan feature to find them and save it back out in wtv format all in a few minutes, acutally inside 3 minutes lately. However as soon as you need to recode, convert formats and such, that can start taking some time, had one one hour show take 14 minutes on a 6 core i7, and while 14 minutes may not seem long it would be if you do it a lot. (wtv to mpeg4)

So I record to wtv format, copy from other sources (like tapes) to wtv format, and watch 90% of the time from WMC in wtv format so no format conversions.

Besides the added processing time, I found when using any package to convert formats it can sometimes take a few tries and some tweeks to get it to come out right, if you stay in one format this is not an issue.

Other than the draw back of tying up a PC, I would agree a video capture card is the better answer for flexibility but I think it will be very hard to beat the VCR+DVR combo on ease of use and of course zero overhead on a PC since there is none in the mix unless you opt to but not required, with this option they acutually never have to see a PC to record or watch, just a little box by the TV somewhere and an HDMI cable. There is something to be said for keeping the TV world simple, very simple.

I hate to say it, but capture cards are on my list again.
Currently I see two options:

1) VCR & DVR.
I did not find a DVR that meets my specs (i.e. record to a reasonable and transferrable format, like H264) and a new concern popped up for me: automatically stop recording when the tape is through. If your have tipps which device meets these specs, let me know.

2) VCR & capture card & PC (Mac in my case)
The biggest issue here will be finding a space where the computer can sit for half a year and kicking my butt into opening up the computer and do the clicks necessary every once in a while. And of course accepting to hog the computer for months and months to come. It's unnerving for me that I also need a monitor as well.
Apart from that, it is easy to find decent recording cards that support formats I like and that also automatically stop if there is no video signal anymore coming from the VCR.