What is a good DVD Recorder/Capture Card?

Is a dvd recorder the same thing as a video capture card?

• here's the deal, i recently have been looking at external video capture cards online(dazzle, and others), and tey're pretty cheap, going around 30-60 bucks, but then i noticed that a friend of mine has a dazzle DVD RECORDER, which has the same look and maker of the other video capture cards im looking at, and it also records dvd's the same way. of course, he will let me buy it, but not borrow it, and im just trying to save the hassle of buying ANOTHER thing here. if anybody knows if a dvd recorder is the same as a video capture card, please tell me.

• Answer:

  A video capture card will capture to your hard drive where you can re-encode, edit, etc. A DVD recorder will record to the DVD, you cannot edit in-place. So it depends on what you want. If you are OK with a bare capture then the DVD recorder is OK for you. But if you want to trim out commercials as well as remove the leading and trailing garbage around the show you are capturing, then you should opt for a capture card. But, in the case of the capture card you need to have somewhere to store the data after you've edited. For this you'll either need to burn to DVD anyway, have a hard drive for storage (getting cheaper all the time!), or just delete shows that you've watched and won't watch again. BTW, a video capture card won't capture DVDs. For this you need a DVD drive, and something to "rip" the movie, etc. As most movies are encrypted you need to use AnyDVD or something in order to get the movie onto your computer.