What is wrong with my DVR?

What is and what is not a DVR? (Kinda long.)?

• I'm having a bit of a debate with some online acquaintances. I asked a question that never got answered because they ran off on some know-it-all tangent that what I was calling a DVR was not a DVR but a DVD recorder. I'm not sure what the distinction is, and I really don't think there is one. Speaking strictly of consumer independent stand alone devices, I have a Panasonic DVR. Panasonic calls it a DVR and so do I. It records to a hard drive or DVDs of various formats, downloads listings from TV Guide to aid programming, etc. What brought up the question was that it started acting a little hinky and I started researching potential replacements in anticipation of failure. The question came up when I found that Panasonic stopped putting hard drives in their DVRs. I had started scoping out Toshiba at that point because they did, but as my DVR kept hanging on, I found that now Toshiba is not putting hard rives into their DVRs anymore, either. I was wondering what happened in the market or development that caused consumer stand alone DVR manufacturers to stop putting hard drives (and I'd still like an answer to that question). My "buddies" pounced on me and said that I didn't know what I was talking about. A DVR has to have a hard drive to record to, I must be talking about DVD recorders. Who made the rules about what makes a Digital Video Recorder? As long as it records to something, it's a DVR as far as I'm concerned. The new crop of consumer recording devices, whatever they're called, do not have hard drive when they used to, but they still do everything else and they still fall under the same model families. So the question is when is a DVR not a DVR?

• Answer:

  Traditionally recorders were named as follows: DVD recorder: A DVD Player /recorder with NO hard drive DVD recorder Combi : A DVD recorder with a built-in Hard drive DVR or PVR: A Hard-disc based recorder Why are DVD recorders/Combi dissapearing? Cost. Most people get a DVR from their cable or satellite provider, so they only rarely need to create a DVD, so they go for the cheapest models.