Okay, I'm thinking about buying a standalone DVD recorder. Now I'm no noob to this by any means, I've used the PC to make DVD's for a while now (I paid almost $400 for my first Sony burner when 2x first hit the market!)

I'm a lazy, lazy man. I just got Tivo so I could save stuff I want to archive. Okay, now my Tivo is full and I've archived nothing. One reason is because I don't have time because capturing video, transcoding, and burning takes a while and ties up my main PC.

So a standalone would free up some stuff and help out a lot. So how do these things work? Specifially, how do you cut out commercials? On the PC if I have a one hour show with six commercial breaks I capture 6 seperate files without commercials and burn them, resulting in 6 chapters. I could do without the chapters, but I HAVE to do without the commercials. Do these things capture/burn realtime, or does it save it and allow you to edit then burn?

What kind of discs do they use? Standard -R or +R like I use now in the PC?

What's a good recorder for under $200? Any more than that and I could just build another PC and dedicate to capturing so I dont' want to break the bank. I don't need progressive scan or component inputs. Just S-video, analog audio, and optical audio.

Any help/opinions/links would be great!