[jmetal88]

Surprise, surprise! I went to a pawn shop today, and they sold me a DVD recorder for $15!

Actually, I'm not sure it's a DVD recorder -- it says it's a Digital Media Recorder on the front panel, but it does have a DVD drive, so I'm kind of assuming it would record to that by default rather than to the USB port on the front panel. I do NOT know if it has a TBC, but I thought $15 was worth the risk. It does have a component output, so at the very least it would have to have some kind of transcoder for the video inside.

EDIT: Huh. The damn thing's a DVR. I opened it because the DVD tray wouldn't open (even though the machine powered up and seems electronically intact), and found a 40GB hard drive inside.

EDIT 2: It does have some sort of TBC, but not a very good one. It works well for 'normal' video, but I tried running a tape of '80s music videos through it, and when they have sections of the screen that are blacked out next to sections that have a full picture, there's still some pretty funky bending going on.

EDIT 3: I've figured out what it is. This crazy thing has some sort of automatic brightness control or something. It seems to be constantly adjusting the picture to maintain a consistent black level, which is honestly kind of annoying on my main CRT, and is probably the cause of the funky distortion I'm seeing on my 1959 Zenith. It's still not a bad purchase for $15 though, and I'll probably start using it to record some of my TV shows (since my VCR is honestly terrible at it -- it probably needs a cleaning, badly).