Watching My New TV

What does my DVR do?

DVR is a Digitial Video Recorder, and what it allows you to do, is record TV shows, primarily. It also allows you to record any moving video image like from a survellience camera. DVR's do wonderful things. They let you watch your TV shows when you want to watch them. They allow you to skip past commercials, if you want to, and in general, allow you to get more use out of TV. Pausing live TV is the ability to actually stop what looks like live TV so you can go attend to something else, and the beauty of that is now you can go answer the phone, go to the restroom, answer the front door without missing your favorite moment on TV. What is actually happening is that you're streaming your video to your DVR, and it is recording while you're watching, so that when you hit pause, it continues to go ahead and stream and record, and when you hit play again, it's actually playing it back from the hard disk itself. There are a number of people out there that in order to skip commercials will actually start the show that they want to watch, hit pause, go off and do something for 10 minutes, or 5 minutes, come back and then start watching their show again. Why? Because that means their TV program -- they're trailing their TV program by 5 or 10 minutes, so they can fast forward through their commercials, and end up watching the TV show, without having to sit through commercials.

What happens if I want to keep something that I recorded on my DVR?

If you've recorded something on your DVR and you want to move it to another source material, you have a couple of different options. One is you can play it out to a VCR. In other words, hit record on your VCR, hit play on your DVR and do it the old fashioned way, which transfers whatever you have on your DVR to the VCR tape. You can also use a firewire port out of the back of the DVR to actually transfer the digital file to another hard disk or to a DVD player. Currently you can't do that in high definition, you can only do it with standard definition format images, but that will probably be changing this year. If you happen to have a TiVo 2 Stand Alone DVR, you have the ability to transfer files out of that particular DVR through a computer network to your computer. You do that by just using its computer connections out of the back. Other types of DVRs out there do not support that capability and none of the DVRs currently support the ability to move high definition images or movies off the hard disk to a computer disk. There is a product out on the market that is an integrated DVR and DVD burner, the idea being that you can record your TV show to your DVR and then transfer that image to the DVD player. You can do that easily. At this time you can only do this with standard definition broadcast, you cannot do it with high definition content.