Panasonic DMR-E80H Progressive-Scan DVD Player/Recorder with Hard Drive , Silver
Can't Live Without It - Easy as a VCR - Only Better
This is a great piece of equipment, I like it more everyday and would hate to live without it now.<br />I use it regularly to record from DirecTV and it works wonderfully. It is just like having a digital quality VCR. I have recorded many television programs and music videos. I burn them to DVD-R and they look perfect and play fine on my Sony DVD changer. Can't tell the difference from original satellite signal. And this is only recording in SP (standard mode). I haven't really seen the need to use XP mode yet. I have also dubbed several old VCR tapes and they turned out excellent.<br />You can't use it just like a Tivo and say record channel 333 (DirecTV) at 2pm to 3pm, but you can set it read L1 (line input 1) from 2pm to 3pm to get whatever channel your satellite receiver is set to. Can easily record any channel and time from my cable feed though, but cable sucks.<br />I hooked up my satellite receiver to this unit and then to my AV receiver and this makes it very easy to hit record at any time. I also have cable and my VCR connected to it.<br />The manual is very easy to use once you figure out a few things, like what a playlist is, etc. They could use a good intro explaining their general concepts. But being very computer literate, I found it easy to figure out.