OTHER TECH

PC or Mac A PC or Mac equipped with a TV tuner and the right software can be turned into the equivalent of a DVD recorder.

Time-shifting Most TV-tuner cards and add-on boxes come with EPG software of varying effectiveness. The EPG included with a Windows Media Center PC, for instance, can only get the program details from the Internet and, in my experience, doesn't always load it properly. But when it does load, selecting and recording programs is easy.

Archiving It's simple to store recordings since you can keep them on the hard drive and offload them to DVDs whenever you want. If you run out of storage space, it's easy enough to upgrade hard-drive storage for virtually limitless capacity.

Editing Even the most basic video-into-DVD software comes with an editor that's more powerful than what you get with a standalone recorder. Video editing on a computer can be point-and-click, drag-and-drop easy. You also get frame-accurate editing precision and enormous versatility as well as much greater control over the audio. And it's easy to preserve sound and picture quality.

Making Copies Using high-speed blanks on the right kind of DVD drive on a powerful PC or Mac will let you make copies of your prized footage at the maximum disc-writing speed - which at the moment is 16x. (In other words, you can fill up a DVD in about 5 minutes!) But most systems can't reach that speed (8x is more common).

Despite their versatility and sophistication, media PCs can still be hard to use. None of the Windows Media Center models we've tested have worked the way they should right out of the box, and all have required hours of tech support to get them to work as advertised. Do some research on the Web to check consumer reaction to the model you want to buy before laying your money down.