I'm looking for a HD Recorder that makes 'permanent' archived recordings....

By "stand-alone" do you mean no PC either? If you are looking for the equivalent of a DVD recorder that does HD/5.1 to BD (i.e. a BD recorder), you are out of luck -- in the US anyhow. If you want to archive HD/5.1 you will need to involve a PC.

I know he doesn't want TiVo but some Netgear ReadyNAS models will automatically archive TiVo's recordings (as long as they aren't protected) with playback on any TiVo. Also, TiVo files can easily be played via various streaming devices.

http://www.readynas.com/?p=4324

Since I use a TiVo and am always transferring files from it, I would love to have one of those ReadyNAS units that is TiVo ready -- but they are just too expensive. I have TiVo desktop running on my media-PC and I have it set up to auto-transfer any episodes of the series I want to collect -- it starts the transfer as soon as the episode has completed recording without any intervention on my part. I figure that is close enough to a ReadyNAS for me.

Media streamers will not directly play .tivo files. .tivo files have an encrypted wrapper that needs to be stripped away. Video ReDo will handle .tivo files and I use it to edit out commercials and save the edit as an .m2ts file on my NAS unit. Then I can use my WD Live players to stream it.

This is certainly a solution for the OP if he can get past his objection to TiVo and the $600 it costs for a non-subscription unit. Still requires a PC though.

They start at $130 for 2 bays and $280 for 4 bays... the new v2 models (current promotion).


I use kmttg (via OS X) and it only take a few minutes without a quality hit. Hence I call it easy.

That is substantially less than I remember last time I checked -- it's been a while. I'll have to give them a second look when the price of HDD's comes down a bit more.


Absolutely. I use kmttg also for 1-off transfers. You can tell it to quickly strip off the .tivo wrapper and just leave the .mpg file after it does the transfer. That .mpg file can be played by just about anything. I usually don't bother with stripping off the .tivo wrapper since Video ReDo will do that automatically when I edit out commercials.

From the brief exchange between Charles R. and myself you should see that TiVo is a ready option for this. That's what a lot of us do. Of course, it only works for non-copy protected source. I know nothing about Avermedia recorders.


Go visit the DVD Recorder Forum. There is an active discussion thread on video converters (HDMI-->component; component-->S-Video) to address exactly this problem. No matter what you do, the PQ will always look worse than recording in HD and the better your display, the worse the SD will look.

Recording HD/5.1 is simply not "cheap".

Do a search for the Hauppauge HDPVR. It has component inputs and records to .TS files using H.264. You can specify to make the recordings compatable with a 360,PS3, or just AVCHD.

However since it uses the "analog loophole"/component of course there is an analog to digital conversion that takes place. The quality hit isn't too bad and you can adjust the bitrate, takes up a ton less space than MPEG2... it retains DD5.1 in AC3 format as well. The recordings I make are 100% compatible with my LED Samsung Smart TV. I plug in my external hard drive and it plays them without fuss, about as close to original quality as you can get, pumping out 5.1 as well.

I have one and while the software is a little bit buggy/twitchy once you get it set up and working it's pretty reliable. The newer drivers/versions are much improved over the first versions which were pretty much beta.

You will need something like this.