[windracer]

I have two standalones and then the Toshiba TX20 with the burner ... and like everyone else here, I love having the DVD drive built-in.

It's great to have the TiVo interface and controls for playing DVDs, and dumping shows quickly to DVD is so much easier with the TX20, even if you can edit out the commercials. I use it all the time to burn a bunch of kids shows to a disc before a family trip, so my daughter can watch in the car, or if a buddy misses an episode of a show, I can quickly get them a copy of it.

Bottom line, they're great.

 

[windracer]

I like the ability to burn without doing a transfer via TTG... so my vote goes for burner combo.

Which reminds me we should probably mention that you cannot burn shows that weren't originally recorded on the DVD unit (i.e., you can't burn MRV'ed shows, or videos you transfered back to your TiVo via TiVoDesktop or Galleon).

 

[windracer]

Though I understand that the Humax records at a lower quality and is therefore equivalent to the 40HR Tivo.

Not sure what you mean there ... the capacity of TiVo boxes is at Basic quality, so you can get 40hrs of basic quality on the 40hr box and 80hrs of basic on the Humax.

What you may be referring to is that the DVD units record at slightly different screen resolutions that are DVD compliant so they don't have to do any transcoding when burning to DVD, but this should not affect quality.

 

[windracer]

One more question for those that have dvd burning units. Do any of those units play dvd movies that you didn't burn, like one you would buy at the store? If they do, what is the interface like?

Yup, they'll play regular commercial DVDs. The control interface is just like watching a TiVo recording or Live TV: you get the green trickplay bar at the bottom, you can do the instant replay (last 8 seconds), and of course 1x, 2x, and 3x RW and FF. My Toshiba peanut remote also has DVD-specific buttons for "menu" and "angle."