HDTV Recording

This is the wrong forum for that subject.
Too many legal beagle, straight arrows here.

Since your desired end product is a std def (SD) DVD, one option would be to copy the HD recording to a Magnavox MDR533's HDD ($230), edit on the Mag (if nothing "fancy" is desired), then high-speed dub (HSD) to DVD.

 

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OTA or cable.

OTA is copy protection free isn't it?

Yes

Since we have no idea where you are starting from -- i.e. what equipment is in play already -- it is impossible to answer your question other than to speculate. So here goes -- if you are starting from scratch, a very inexpensive way is to buy a Silicon Dust HD Homerun network tuner box. If you are OTA you get the HDHR-3 (dual tuner, ATSC, $70). If you are cable you get the HDHR Prime (3-tuner, cable card, $160) and rent a cable card. You then hook it to your network and use your PC (Win-7 WMC) to record the HDTV broadcast directly to your PC's HDD as the original HD/5.1 transport stream -- that's all it takes. You can do whatever you want to with the video file afterwards.

Record it on your HD-DVR then transfer the recording in HD using the HD-DVR component out (if it has one) to a computer via a hauppage hd pvr 1212 on clearance a BB for 139.
From the computer you can either burn to disc AVCHD and play in a bluray player or play the raw file via a media player (or some bluray players).

One piece of information that would help us to guide you is knowing whether your priority is compatibility (having these DVDs play back on any DVD player), quality (getting the best picture and sound from your recordings) or space (fitting as many episodes on a disc as possible), because there are some tradeoffs between ease-of-use, recording quality, and space. How easy, expensive, and time consuming this is depends on your priorities.

The major downside of copying the video with component outputs is that it has to happen in real time, i.e. you have to play back the entire file while you record it. Some loss of quality also occurs from decompressing and recompressing the video (transcoding), too. If you use an OTA DVR like the TViX 6620:

http://www.avsforum.com/t/1195962/official-dvico-tvix-m6620n-hd-atsc-qam-tuner-topic

you can transfer the original MPEG-2 TS directly to your computer over your network (or using a USB HDD). If you recorded a 480i channel, you could convert the MPEG TS to PS format, put it inside a VOB container, and burn it to DVD without any quality loss and with the benefit of having a standard video DVD that would play in any DVD player.

If you want to preserve HD quality, you would need to either burn the episodes to BD-R (since DVD-R doesn't have enough space to hold more than an episode or two of MPEG-2 video in HD) or transcode the videos to a more efficient format, such as MPEG-4. Recompressing the video to H.264 would let you fit several HD episodes on a DVD, but either way you would need either a computer or a Blu-ray player to view the files on the disc, because a standard DVD player wouldn't understand MPEG-2 video in HD or understand MPEG-4 video at all, regardless of its resolution.