I appologize for the long post. I need to post my thoughts here
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For the longest time now, I've been watching and waiting for set-top DVD recorders to become reasonably priced. More important, though, is the wait for them to find the right mix of features and the search for a unit that meets some basic requirements.

Well, it appears that we are in another stage of DVD recorders. The last stage was occupied primarily by Philips (DVD985) and Panasonic (DMR30), and who released DVD+R and DVD-R units, respectively. Both units provided basic recording functions to discs and attempted some basic DVR features as well.

Now these companies have their new sets out and are joined by a few others. It's very confusing, and I'd like other people's opinions on these units, though I'm basically going to focus on these companies still.

Basically, the new generation has hard drives. However, it doesn't appear that they do what we want yet. What is the most desired is a unit that will record a program, allow us to remove the commercials, and store the video on the disc. This would require a hard drive. However, these units appear to only use the hard drive so that larger amounts of video storage can be acheived whilst using their DVR features. This is going in the opposite direction I had hoped.

Here are a couple of the current units:

Panasonic DMRE50S - about $400-450

Philips DVDR80 and DVDR75 - about $450-550

I browsed the Panasonic's downloadable manual, and I've looked at the Philips in Best Buy. I looked at one thing: the ability to "edit" videos.

The Philips unit did just what I suspected it did: not actually edit. Their version of "editing" is to "mark scenes" in the video. Basically putting track marks at the beginning and end of pieces of video that you don't want, and when the unit plays back the video, those portions get skipped. It doesn't delete the video at all, and you still lose about 8 minutes per half hour to commercials.

The Panasonic is even worse because it appears to do the same thing but doesn't make it as straight-forward. In their long and complicated user manual, they have a chapter on editing. They basically give you intructions on how to "delete" content (divide recordings then delete), but then state that you won't gain any recording space on your disc. I'm willing to bet that this is because it works the same way as the Philips. There is a chance it could just be due to how the video files end up when several segments are removed from it (maybe that space can't be recovered), but they make it sound like the editing is not actually editing.

So, after all that, what do you folks think? I am just chomping at the bit to get a DVD recorder, but I can't seem to find one that does what I want. To summarize:

-hard drive for editing
-focus on editing and archival as opposed to lackluster DVR devices
-a realistic rewriteable format (I don't care which format you side with in the war, DVDRAM is the worst. I want to play all my discs on someone else's machine)

That's all. I don't see why this is so difficult!