How do they work?

[JamesGT]

I've been fooling around with my new DVD Recorder and I'm starting to like it's possibilities(other than the fact that I can't back up my VHS tapes).

How do these units work? Do they operate with a lot of memory? Do they have a small HD or Flash memory?

I ask because when I record video off the TV it doesn't seem to record directly to the disk. It saves it somewhere and then burns it after I press stop on the remote. It must be storing it somewhere, or does it just finalize the video on the disc when you press stop?

It has menus, titles, backgrounds, etc. etc. It must store them somewhere.

[trhouse]

Dvd recorders do not have much memory. There is some fast dram associated with the mpeg encoding process and there is memory in the commonly used microcontroller chips which can contain the operating system and menus. The few minutes it takes to finalize a disk does not involve writing video to the disk. Hard drive recorders are a different story.

[samijubal]

When you press stop the record session information is written to the disc is all that is.