DVD recorder with satellite PVR, a couple of questions

[Velak]

G'day!

I visit this site, and read these forums all the time. I bet I could not begin to express how much I've learned from the helpful people and guides posted here, in all that time.

However in the past weeks I've not been able to exactly find an answer to some questions I have, neither here, nor on avsforums, or the CDfreaks forums, so.. decided to post.

I have a BEV satellite receiver which I currently use to record shows onto. I have several 120G drives I use with it. Currently my method of getting shows to DVD is recording until my PVR's drive is nearly full of stuff I wish to actually keep, (most stuff is watched and deleted, so it takes me quite some time to fill a drive up with the actual "keep" stuff) then I swap out the drives (put in an empty drive, and take the full one to my PC) where I rip what I want from the drive, edit out commercials, and burn it to a DVD.

Recently, I have been considering getting a stand-alone DVD burner. I've got my eyes on the Pioneer DVR640HS.

I realize the "nice" factor of having a HD on the DVD. Editing is fine, but I'm sure I can do it faster on my PC than I can with the buttons on a remote, so it's not all that essential.

My first question is...
If I were to buy a stand-alone DVD Recorder, and use it with my current satellite receiver.. and if I were to record to the DVD, "live" as the image is being broadcast, is the quality any better than recording it off of the PVR's hard drive later?

I believe the answer to that one will be "It doesn't matter if you record live, or off of the PVR's hard drive, as the PVR's hard drive records the stream directly as it is broadcast, so what you play back off the hard drive later, is the same already-compressed stream your satellite actually received. Therefore, you could record to the PVR's hard drive as usual, and play it back later while recording it to the DVD, and the result would be the exact same as if you recorded it directly to the DVD recorder (or the DVD recorder's hard drive) during the initial "live" broadcast."

Please let me know if that is not correct.

Now then, if it IS correct.. then, I would really have no need for a DVD recorder with a hard drive, since I would just be able to burn to a DVDRW, and then take it to a PC, edit out the commercials as I normally do, and burn to it's final DVD. (as usual)

Or I could get one with a much smaller hard drive, just to edit out commercials on the DVD recorder itself, then when I bring it to the PC for titles, menus, etc, I wouldn't have to re-encode at all, but rather just do the titles, menus, etc.

This brings me to my second question:
Would the quality of the image encoded by the DVD recorder be any different from the way I'm doing it now?

I mean, it would still have to take the original stream, and re-encode it to DVD format... how is that any different (technically) than how I'm doing it now?

I realize, it could save me some time and energy (mostly in swapping hard drives.. I'd just have to carry a disk back and forth instead of a disk drive. I do the drive swap like, I don't know.. once every 6 months or something, which gives me lots of time to put the stuff onto DVD, before the "new one" is full again and we start the process over.

So, is it really any different from how I'm doing it now? Would the quality of the results be any different? Better? worse?

Some may ask why I'm considering a DVD recorder in the first place, since this works quite well for me.
Well, I also have some family VHS and Hi-8 tapes I'd like to backup as well, but that's another project. Again, most of my editing is done on the PC.

Given my setup, and needs, what DVD recorder would you recommend?

Thank you much for taking the time to read, and respond.

[oldfart13]

The direct stream is right off the PVR HDD (ie. all digital) recording to the DVD Recorder will be an analog copy (it must be made into a format suitable for the recorder or TV, hence analog). Ripping the PVR HDD is the best option in regard to quality.....