Downloading and or burning movies from DirecTV box to external hard drive or discs

And this is related to plasma displays how?

I asked the moderators to move to the appropriate forum

If you have a disc recorder that can accept the component video output of the DVR, it should work. Do such exist? There is no known method of "extracting" recordings from the DirecTV DVRs.

Do you want your recordings to be in SD/2.0 or HD/5.1. If SD is OK, there are several threads in this forum that discuss using DVD recorders hooked up to the STB/DVR outputs. You can use a DVD recorder to edit the content and burn to DVD-R.

For HD/5.1 you will need a PC and either a Hauppauge 1212 or Hauppauge Colossus which hook up to the DVR's component video outputs and optical digital audio output. The recording will be on the PC in H.264/AVC format ready for editing and burning to BD-R. There is no stand-alone BD-R recorder on the US market and probably never will be.

You should have no problem copying (in real time) to (most) DVD recorders. I use DVD rewriteables, then edit the content on my computer using TMPGEnc software. I then burn the results to blank discs.
However, your copies will be in SD. Also, depending on the recorder, you may deal with "copy once" or "copy never" flags. i understand that Sony machines are the worst offenders. I use Panasonic DVD recorders and have no problems. i do not have HBO or any "premium" channels, so that may be different.

Possibly Black Magic intensity shuttle would work aswell. Just google that one up.

They both produce the same output recording from the component outputs of the DVR, it just depends on what type of hardware connectivity you want. In either case the transfer from the DVR is going to be real time. You have to "play" the DVR capture into the recording device -- there is no other way.

That is the reality for getting content off any satellite or cable supplied DVR. There is no way other than to play the content and capture it in real time. If you had cable or were OTA then I would say to get a TiVo which allows high-speed network transfers of recorded content to PC in standard MPEG-2 format.

While essentially true, I have made it a practice to start recording just before going to bed, and letting it continue until completed. If I am behind, I can do the same thing in the morning and then go to work. Yes, it's still realtime, but it's pretty effective. With my DirecTV DVR, I can save a number of shows in a folder and then play back the entire folder. After that it finished, I can separate them into individual episodes and copy them to optical media as individual episodes or titles..

Yes, of course. I thought we answered all this for you already.
You still have to play the recording in real time to get it off the DVR.

The way cable/sat DVRs record to their hard disks makes the content indecipherable unless it's played back on the box (TiVo is an exception.) Even if you could move the files there is no way to make heads or tails of the resulting mess on your computer. Church AV Guy said it best. Set it to record while you're asleep or doing something else.

This is of course not entirely true. You CAN archive directly but it isn't an easy process and only works with some Dish/Bell equipment, not DTV. Check the Yahoo groups if interested...