Saving/capture solutions for saving off (extending) DVR

[ET3D]

We (my wife and I) have a DVR from the satellite company (Yes in Israel), and it's getting full too quickly. Some of it is kids movies we keep, some just out inability to keep up. We occasionally decide to just stop watching a series and delete all episodes, but we'd like to be able to move things off the DVR (which doesn't have a way to extend it with an external disk).

We've used DVD recorders for this, but the problem is they stop working pretty quickly (current one worked for a year and a half, which is better than the previous one). I also use Avidemux and DVDPatcher to convert to a 16:9 (correct ratio) MPEG2 file for playback on a media player.

I also have Honestech VHS to DVD 4.0, a USB converter which seems to work well enough. The laptop I tried to run it on (Thinkpad X120e, AMD E-350 based) is too weak for the Honestech software (which records to DVD format), but Virtual VCR works decently (or probably will, once I manage to get it to compress; Virtualdub produced a slideshow, but Virtual VCR dropped relatively few frames uncompressed). Even if I get it to work, I'd still need to encode to get a reasonable size

So there are solutions, but I'm looking for one which will require the least work (further encoding, etc.) and be most reliable, and would like to hear suggestions to help me make a decisions and make me aware of solutions I don't know. Options I see are:

- Fix the DVD recorder or get a new one. Went that route before, a little tired of it because it stops working.

- A video recording device which does support external disks which would be hooked to the output of the current DVR. I'm not really familiar with these.

- An HTPC with high enough power to run the Honestech software. Should be the most flexible solution, since it could store and play the files and use several external disks if needed. Also the most expensive solution, and perhaps not the easiest to use (it will require a keyboard, mouse and remote control).

What do you think?

[usually_quiet]

Uncompressed requires a lot of hard drive space, around 75GB/hr. Even lightly compressed video recorded with a lossless codec requires a quite a bit of HDD space (on the order of 30GB/hr for HuffYUV. Some others take a bit less but require a bit more CPU power).

You could look into a USB PC device that does hardware MPEG-2 compression. The Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1900 (model 1179) is a USB device of this type for PAL video that can work with a fairly modest CPU.