OTA Recording

This probably does not belong here, but I ask so that I can get this answered from a UTV users viewpoint.

We just put up a TV tower and are now getting some of my locals. I still pay for Eastcoast and Westcoast feeds, so I can UTV them but we had lost our PBS a few years back even though I challenged and won waivers from the local CBS and FOX stations on being in a fringe area. Our PBS station filed backruptcy and forced everyone off the national feed (eventhough it took a 35ft tower to get them, clowns).

I have a RCA DRC8335 a combo DVD-R & VCR with ATSC which I'm actually using as a tuner for our old CRT. The DVD-R is single layer, so its only 1hr at max resolution. I can get the unit to work with the RCA UTV's remote but would like a HD option.

Okay, so here is my "wish list" of features:
- OTA recording
- ideally no mothly subscription for OTA (maybe the rumored DirecTV - TiVO?)
- Ethernet for streaming (a $ subscription is understood for this)
- DVD Buring (if no ethernet)
- RCA compatibility

It might be easiest to go the PC tuner card route once we get a new computer this summer, but for now I only have a 40Gb HD, 2.2GHz P4 which won't cut it.

Thanks, I was actually looking at the Channel Master offering when reviewing OTA antennas. Certainly something to consider as the path of least resistance. Does it have an ethernet connection or anything that would let me drop and drag digital records across to my PC for archiving?

I could always still 1:1 record on the DVD-R unit but you know, that is slow and often doesn't happen. I think Philips and Sony had update to the RCA combo DVD-R / VHS unit that nicked the VHS side for a 320Gb HD. I assume that is still a 1:1 transfer and would likely lose my RCA remote.

Seems like they are lots of options, none just boxed up into a single set though. Now with TV's having some of the web features built in, we should be seeing more of this sort of stuff? I'm still leaning towards the WD Media Server route, if only I could find a decent priced equivalent with TV tuning built-in.

Thanks for the input. Next step is to get the TV tower guy back over to aerial mount the cellular modem antenna for a steady 3Mb/s connection.

Your apporach sounds like the Ying and Yang of DVR days gone by with a TiVO and UTV sitting side by side.

Still trying to coordinate the tower climbing guy with the cell service guy and the electrican.

Well, we had the tower guy out. The 3G cell service is still pretty iffy at the moment. The heatwave has reeked haovic on their equipment, but we did get the Yagi installed and I also added a FM turnstyle antenna. First time I had decent FM in nearly two decades!

Having heard The Cleaner's experience, TiVo looks more and more like the way to go. Initial read on the THR22 TiVo unit is that it will OTA?

Well we surrendered our UTV for DirecTV's HR24, see related post "Bowing Out". I still have grandfathered East & West coast feeds and also the locals. I can DVR all three. My 3G cell modem service actually back slide to less than 500kBs, so we switched over to WildBlue's 14Mip, 60Gb per month plan under the rural internet act. It seems to be working for the most part, although I get random DNS lookup errors. We just got the HR24 so I don't know how bad that will tax our usage, but our first month we only used 3Gb of our 60Gb plan.