I do quite a bit of recording into the computer for burning. I picked up an ADS Pyro, firewire A/V link to digitize the video and that works great for analog sources. The retail of it is a bit pricey, but you can catch a good sale if you wait long enough and watch /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif They also make USB2 versions of the same thing.
If you're talking about a direct to DVD recorder thing that doesn't use a computer, I don't know much about those. Using the computer lets you do so much more for creating menu's and editing out the commercials and such and adding titles and the rest that even though it takes a bit more "post production" work I've pretty much stuck to that. And you can get a DVD burner for the computer for between $80 and $100 bucks now.
One thing you'll definitely want to do is to test out the DVD blanks that you buy. Some brands just don't play well, or at all, in some brands of DVD players. I've had good luck with the $1 a piece "Teon" branded ones I've bought from a Staples in town. But I've been unable to get any of my machines to recognize the TDK ones I bought on sale at BestBuy the other day. They are OK for data backups in the computer, but my DVD player won't play them.
I also bought some more expensive Sony ones to send video of the kids to relatives because I thought they would be the most compatible, and indeed they are proving to be so.
So test a few different brands to start with and find one that works in both your recorder and player. There are some that are really fancy looking and cost several dollars a piece, but I think thats a ripoff, a little experimenting and you can find less expensive brands that work fine.
Don't expect them to last forever though. Like CDR's the life span is probably at most a few years, less if they aren't stored properly /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif
