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Originally published at Verily Lolth. You can comment here or there. Seeing as my dad refused to buy me anything computer or gaming related for my birthday, I asked him for a DVD recorder some two months ago. My idea was to record some gaming footage with it since I don't really watch regular telly and my LCD TV is there for 1) consoles and 2) video feed from my computer. However I HATE composite cables, which amazingly enough is still some sort of a standard it seems. So my consoles are connected through component and there is a big difference in colours and outlines (for the better) even when it;s something from the PS2 in 480i SD. My computer is, of course, connected through DVI->HDMI. Enters the video recorder. I'll admit that I didn't research the damn thing all that long, since it was a pretty sudden idea that I had to come up with. So, damn thing has a composite input, and S-Video input, and a SCART one. SCART is a pretty awful European idea (blame the French), and while it's not all bad, it's bad enough - and on the other hand it's good enough to have progressively made component connections not very popular in Europe. So then I had started looking for a convertor from component to scart. I almost thought I had it down, but then of course it turns out it couldn't be a simple cable since component was YUV and scart was mostly RGB and few TVs or other equipment accepted YUV scart - and of course my TV or dvd recorder didn't. So, I looked into converters, and found one - costing £90 but hey, I'd have bought it if it had to be. But then it turns out crappy scart couldn't even handle anything past 480i (or 576i in the case of PAL) so it would have been good for.. the ps2 and that's all. Okay, then I start looking for dvd recorders with component input - a pretty rare breed, and find out that even if I got one, they don't handle HD either >_< I'd lost hope pretty much and decided to stick with just changing the cables from the console when I wanted to record but obviously no spontaneous recording. Enter Ebay. At first I found Hauppauge's HD recorder - the thing had component input, component passthrough and all - and a bunch of complains about overheating and not using computer resources etc. Regular price ~$225 and ebay had enough of them new. I was almost sure to get one but of course it's not in Europe (really, does Europe get anything decent at all these days), so I had to find one with international shipping that wasn't a rip-off $70. And then I found an auction for a piece of Gefen machinery. Gefen is one of the best companies to make various switches and converters of the kind - of course with a price tag to match. 
So this Gefen Personal HD Recorder costs between $770 and $999 depending on where you buy it. It comes with component, composite, S-Video and HDMI input, and a HDMI output and can record in up to 1080i. That's where my TV stops supporting as well. It comes with a 80GB hdd to keep the recorded stuff on and an SD card slot to transfer it - that being a minor turn off, no USB or similar but hey I have a couple of SD cards lying around and it's not like I want to move a single 80GB file to my computer. 
The component output is just fine because my TV has two so I'm not going to bother seding computer input through the box (although if I wanted to record some computer game in HD, it would do a much better job than Fraps). And the best bit of course is, I got the ebay auction for ~$300 including shipping. I think I'll just give that DVD recorder I got for my birthday to my dad to play with! I still can't wait for the Tales of the Abyss anime, and I'm at 80 hours in the game doing every single sidequest - something I didn't do before. Though I idiotically started a new game instead of starting from clear file so now there is a costume title I can't get from the Nebilim fight since it needs to be done in Very Hard or Unknown mode and that's only available on second playthrough. But all the other stuff only available in the second playthrough is actually already available simply because of that clear file on my memory card.
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