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My VCR quit. New VCR's no longer include tuners unless you want to special order one for well over $400.
This little gadget looked promising, and Hauppauge's web site promises it will work with Linux, so I got one yesterday. My $275 Toshiba Celeron Windows7 laptop made a flawless 2 hour recording of a movie last night while I was sleeping. I opened the file using Avidemux in Linux to cut before show, after show and ads and the finished mpeg looks great.
Bottom line $83 once for this little device that lets me keep a recording for my own, legal use or $20+ every month to the cable company for their "decoder" and a limited storage DVR... It's a no-brainer.
What's great about it: Easy set up, files can be edited.
What's not so great: Hasn't worked in Linux... yet.