My mom (82 years old) is still using a VCR with a tuner box. We are
concerned about it wearing out, the tapes no longer being sold, etc..
She just spent $65 on a 9 pack of tapes from Amazon that could have gone
to a new setup and she is saying she wants to get another VCR for
backup. But they haven't been made in years, so it would already be
used. I have a linux computer running VDR with a couple of dual ATSC
dual tuner cards. But it needs to be rebuilt/reinstalled and I haven't
messed with it in so long, I would have to learn it all over again and
I'm not as good at figuring stuff out as I used to be and money is tight.
You can get VDR/Linux images ready to go for a Raspberry pi which cost
about $35. Add a USB Tuner and a USB drive and you have a digital
recorder system. And if I ever get mine rebuilt, they could be linked
and share tuners and drive space. But it's complicated and time
consuming to setup for me atm.
These ready made units would be simpler to get going, but a good one
would cost more and be more complicated for her to use. I still have to
setup timers for recording with the VCR.
I'm looking for recommendations/options/opinions. While the local over
the air guide is mostly a mess, sometimes not sending out the prime time
data till nearly noon of that day, we'd want to avoid having to sub to
any service to keep cost down. Needs to be local recording, be able to
use local guide data and when needed setup blind recordings as done on
VCRs, and would be nice if you could plug and remove USB drives/sticks
for longer term storing recordings. From what I've seen, these ready
made systems don't really like media swapping.
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