Bought a DVD burner, better than TIVO......

[johnrrogers]

We bought a new HD monitor for the house a few weeks ago and also bought a DVD burner/player and it has worked great. Here is what I did which ended up being a pretty good setup finally I think. I bought the Westinghouse 42 inch "monitor" at Best Buy and it ended up at $889 and since it is a monitor has no tuner at all and it did come with a $30 gift card. I looked at several other LCD HD sets but ones with a good digital tuner were much more expensive ($1500 ?) and a set with an analog tuner will need a digital tuner shortly anyways. My wife said we need a new DVD player so I looked at those to see what had a built in tuner and LG makes one that also records direct to DVD and also pushes ALL resolution to 1080i even on my standard Dish Network channels. The LG burner ended up costing $190 and it came with a $40 gift card which I used to buy a long HDMI cable. So I have been recording 3 hours a time onto DVD of the LeMans 24 hour race and will also do the Indy F1 race and Michigan NASCAR races tomorrow since I found the DVDs are ready to play in any DVD player, including the one in my F350!

 

[Tx_Atty]

pretty cool. Do the settop boxes provided by cable companies (verizon fios in my case) do the necessary tuner work? I want a large screen tv but would opt for a monitor if the tuner is in the set box.

 

[johnrrogers]

All setup boxes I have had, including the old 12 foot dish system, Cox Cable and my current Dish Network, have a connector on the rear for TV-out and that is what I use. The box is actually in the living room near where the cables come through the wall and I have a Radio Shack signal booster to feed the Dish box TV-out signal to the rest of the house, including the garage of course. One of the drops is at the LG DVD burner to it's TV-in. I also plan to connect a color security camera to one of the inputs either on the monitor or the LG box that covers the front door area.