Setting up home theater

[Jammers]

Not sure if this is the place to ask these questions but here goes. I need to hook up a Toshiba DVR620 DVD/VHS Recorder to my home theater. It includes a 60-inch Panasonic Plasma TV Oppo Blu-ray player Yamaha A/V receiver and HD cable box. How would i hook the DVD/VCR combo to this setup? The receiver is the Yamaha RX-V473.

[Mr Peabody]

Ideally the Oppo & cable box would be connected to your Yamaha and then from the Yamaha a video output connection to your TV.

If the Yamaha has up-conversion from from lower video resolution to HDMI your Toshiba can also be hooked to the Yamaha. You can probably do an optical or coaxial digital audio for the DVD side to Yamaha but the VCR will be definitely analog (red/white). If the Yamaha don't up-convert lo-rez to HDMI then you better hope the TV has analog outputs.

Now if you are wanting to record from this Toshiba then things get interesting. Hopefully the cable box has both HDMI and analog outputs. The HDMI would go to Yamaha then the analog (red/white/yellow) would go to the Toshiba. To see what's recording you'd have to set the Yamaha on the input the Toshiba was connected to.

Now if the analog is already to the TV for viewing without the Yamaha turned on then you would have to see if you have an analog output on the TV to feed to the Toshiba for recording. If it was me I'd use the cable company's DVR which is usually built into the HD box and call it a day on recording but I can understand occasionally wanting a DVD backup of something. We recorded a lot of kids programs that way. Of course, now they just junk up my DVR with that stuff :).

But see where this gets you and if there is a problem we'll take another shot at it.