Tivo is worth the nominal subscription IMHO. We have DirecTV with Tivo and I believe the extra charge is about $5 per month. WELL worth it -- especially if programming VCRs is difficult for you (it is darn annoying to us and we don;t do it anymore since getting the Tivo). OF course, once we found how great they were, we got a 2nd one for the back of the house. Tivo is the easiest thing in the world to use, though I must say that the company has done a POOR job in the advertising department - they have never been able to adequately communicate what it really is and does. Do you have an on screen program guide with your current cable system? If so, then imagine being able to go to the guide, see a program listed that you like and hit "select." That is all there is to recording with Tivo. Under select, you can even tell it to record just this once, or every day or week when the program is on. There is another button (big and you cannot miss it) that you push when you want to veiw the menu of programs you have recorded. You scroll up and down and then hit select to play what you want. There is no comparison between the concept of Tivo and a VCR. Very different animals. L

John: I'm pretty sure that my Panasonic also uses -R format. I didn't choose to use that format because my understanding is that they have to be formatted before recording, as well as finalized after. My recorder does not accept all formats (no +RW, for instance). LG makes some machines that do, but they had too many negative user reviews for me to take a chance. Panasonic is pushing the RAM disk format since those can be re-recorded and edited many times. But the disks are much more expensive than the others. I use my one RAM disk to record TV programs that we want to see once, or may fall sleep during watching, so we can see the end later. Check your instructions to see what formats your machine can use. It's confusing, you might want to take a look at some of the sites like About.com and Crutchfield, for explanations of the disk formats. Recording off the air or off of cable lets you collect movies, and TV shows, just like the old VCRs did. Depending on the quality of the signal, and the availability of commercial-free channels like HBO or TCM, you can build up a library, if you like. No having a hard disk just means that you can't save the programs to the hard disk and do the editing tricks that those machines can do. But you can record a movie for less that $1 (cost of a disk) and that's not bad. Steve

If you are skillful with your PC, there are several cards out there that will turn your PC into a viable DVR. Your biggest problem may be having a large enough hard drive. One manufacturer that comes to mind is ATI. They have one video card that performs hardware compression of the video before putting it on the hard drive.

I bought an Ilo brand about a year ago. I tried using it as a VCR. Worked great at first. Then I started getting bad DVD RW disks with it. It still records DVD R just fine. Just not RW. If you only have 30 or so VHS movies, DVD R would work just fine for that. Go rent a recorder from Rent-A-Center or some place. If these are commercial video tapes they won't record. But home made VHS tapes will record just fine. I just got a Tivo box. Free with a one year commitment. $12.95/month. And I can transfer recordings to my computer. Not sure, but a Tivo box should take a VCR input. I suggest renting a DVD recorder for a week or a month and see if you like the results you get. Hope this helped some. Pooh Bear