How to burn a DVD from a PVR

[Manjushri]

In my country, South Africa, we have a television subscription system which seems similar to Tivo (here the decoder is called a PVR or "Personal Video Recorder") which records TV broadcasts onto the device's hard drive from where one can then watch the shows you have recorded at your leisure. However, all content is copy-protected. With piracy being pretty bad, I can understand this. However, all I want to do is to record shows onto DVDs so that I can watch these on my laptop when I am travelling - honestly, I have no wish to make more copies to sell or to profit from financially in any way, and I would be happy to erase the DVDs when I have finished watching them. So, if you feel you don't have ethical problems with this, could anyone suggest how this can be done? I also have a DVD recorder onto which shows can be recorded, but when I want to burn DVDs the copy-protection kicks in again and so I have had no luck going that route either. Your help would be greatly appreciated!

[guns1inger]

You have a couple of choices. You can look at one of the so-called 'video cleaners' or a full frame time base corrector to put between your PVR and your recorder. These will strip off any copy protection signal and allow you to burn a copy to DVD. Or you could look at a video capture card for your PC that ignores copy protection flags, and do your encoding there instead.

[Manjushri]

Thanks for your helpful suggestions! I have ordered a capture card, so here's keeping fingers crossed...