DVD recorder
Such devices are available as either installable drives for computers or as standalone components for use in television studios or home theater systems.
As of March 1, 2007 all new tuner-equipped television devices manufactured or imported in the United States must include an ATSC tuner.
More recently, manufacturers have begun to phase out DVD drives from laptop computers in favor of portability and digital media.
When the standalone DVD recorder first appeared on the Japanese consumer market in 1999, early units were very expensive, costing between $2500 and $4000 USD.
Certain models include mechanical hard disk drive-based digital video recorders (DVRs) to improve ease of use.
Standard definition VCR replacement DVD video recorders typically has a set of standard recording modes for fitting 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 hour modes (XP, SP, LP, EP, SLP, SEP, respectively) on single layer 12 cm discs (DVD5).
This will have a limited impact in ending the need for DVD recorders to perform realtime MPEG-2 encoding or transcoding.
The US requirement of ATSC compatibility forces inclusion of MPEG-2 decoding hardware, which is already part of all DVD players but which otherwise would be unnecessary in an analog-only VCR.
The DVD recorders offer additional capabilities, such as automated VCR-style timeshifting of programming and a variety of output formats, that are deliberately not included in the most common mass-market US ATSC converters.
Some, however, do suffer from many of the same design limitations as the less costly converter boxes, including poorly designed signal strength meters, incomplete display of broadcast program information, incompatibility with antenna rotators or CEA-909 smart antennas and inability to add digital channels without wiping out all existing channels and rescanning the entire band.
Some units also provide limited USB or flash memory interface capability, often only supporting viewing of digital camera still photos or playback of MP3s with no ability to write video to these media.
Though popular for their convenience (in the manner of VHS-C), DVD camcorders are not suitable for professional use due to higher levels of compression compared to MiniDV and the difficulty of editing MPEG-2 video.
