Not too long ago, if you wanted to record an HDTV program, you had to take a quaint step back in time and use a VCR — a digital VCR, but still a VCR. Today, there are a number of hard-disk options for recording HD, but if you want to save the program so it won’t be accidentally erased from the hard drive, you have to resort to — you guessed it — a VCR. It’s still not possible to use the single most popular format in history — DVD — for high-def recording. But early next year will see the arrival of two formats, HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc, that can handle every high-def chore. In the meantime, here’s a survey of all currently available options.

SATELLITE
Dish Network and DirecTV both sell 250-gigabyte (GB) receivers that can record high-def programs from their respective satellite channels and, via built-in DTV tuners, from over-the-air network broadcasts. These receivers will let you record two shows at the same time even while you play back a third show you’ve already recorded. You can store up to 30 hours of HD or 200 hours of standard-definition programs.

The Dish Player DVR 942 ($699 for purchase or $250 to lease) uses the service’s homegrown program guide, which is included in the price of the programming subscription (but there’s also a $5-a-month DVR usage fee). The DirecTV HR10-250 ($599 for purchase — no lease option) includes TiVo service for $6 a month, but you can’t use it without a DirecTV subscription.

CABLE
If your cable company offers HDTV channels (most do), ask it to swap out your current box for a dual-tuner high-def model with a 120- to 160-GB hard drive that can hold up to 20 hours of high-def or 90 hours of regular programming. While it’s up to the cable company to decide what model you actually get, it’s likely to be either the Motorola DCT6412 (offered by Comcast, RCN, and others) or the Scientific-Atlanta Explorer 8300HD (from Time Warner and others). Your cable service will charge $8 to $10 a month, in addition to your programming subscription, to lease a box.

STANDALONE DVRs
If want to buy a high-def DVR but aren’t interested in satellite programming, you first need to decide whether you want to receive and record just over-the-air high-def channels or cable channels as well. LG’s LST-3410A HDTV receiver/DVR ($899) has a 120-GB hard drive that can hold 12 hours of HD programs or 120 hours of standard-definition programs. While it’s designed to be used with an antenna, it also has a QAM tuner for receiving unscrambled cable channels. Though the unscrambled lineup varies by cable system, that might include the digital versions of your local ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox stations, but won’t include premium channels like HBO.

Until recently, you had to use a cable box to decrypt all the channels you subscribe to, but a conditional-access device called CableCARD that you lease from your cable company has been showing up in more and more high-def TVs and components. Sony and Mitsubishi now offer recorder/tuners that can accept a CableCARD. The 500-GB drive on Sony’s DHG-HDD500 ($999, reviewed in October) can hold 60 hours of HD shows. (There’s also a 250-GB model, the DHG-HDD250, for $800.) Mitsubishi’s HD-6000 box ($2,100) has a 120-GB drive good for storing about 12 hours of high-def programs. But unlike the Sony model, the Mitsubishi comes with an IEEE 1394 (FireWire) connection so you can daisy-chain hard drives or dub your recordings to a D-VHS deck.

TVs WITH BUILT-IN DVRs
Since you don’t need physical access to a hard drive to use it, several manufacturers have put them in TVs, eliminating the wires and space needed for a separate component. Mitsubishi, for example, offers four DLP rear-projection models with 160-GB DVRs, ranging in screen size from 62 to 73 inches and in price from $5,800 to $8,000. Because the sets each have two DTV tuners and a CableCARD slot, you don’t need a cable box to record a high-def show while watching another one live. LG offers several plasma TVs with built-in 160-GB recorders, ranging in screen size from 50 to 60 inches and in price from $8,000 to $15,000. (LG’s 50-inch model was reviewed in the July/August issue.) Toshiba offers an external 160-GB DVR called Symbio as a $300 option for its integrated HDTVs with a FireWire connection.

HD DVD and BLU-RAY DISC
Video enthusiasts in Japan are already using Blu-ray to make HDTV recordings, and the first Blu-ray recorders are expected to be introduced in the U.S. early next year. While it’s now likely that the HD DVD camp won’t introduce the first players and prerecorded movies until early next year, it’s not clear when the first recorders will be out. Prices for recorders in either format have yet to be announced, but the first players are expected to sell for around $1,000. By the way, the two new disc formats are completely incompatible — but you probably figured that out already.

D-VHS
While it used to be the only way you could record or view prerecorded movies in high-def, D-VHS has never really caught on. Part of the reason is that DVD’s ease of use has made the drill of fast forwarding and rewinding a tape hopelessly quaint. But D-VHS decks offer a relatively easy way to create HD recordings that don’t have to sit trapped on a hard drive.

D-VHS recorders have digital tuners that let you directly receive and record over-the-air HDTV programs. You can also connect the recorder’s FireWire input to the FireWire outputs on some cable boxes so you can transfer the shows you really want to keep, while making room for new recordings on the cable box’s hard drive. For the time being, this makes D-VHS the most practical way to build an unlimited collection of HDTV shows, but the onus is on you to tell your cable company that you want a box with FireWire output.

JVC, which invented the VHS format, is the leading manufacturer of D-VHS decks. (There are also models available from Mitsubishi and Marantz.) JVC’s HM-DT100U ($1,500) records to a DF300 D-VHS cassette ($15), which holds about 32 GB of high-def material, good for about 5 hours of recording.

MEDIA CENTER PCs While A/V enthusiasts await the high-def Blu-ray and HD DVD disc formats, computer mavens are already recording HD programs off the air to their spacious hard drives and even archiving some shows to DVD. If you have a 3-GHz or faster computer, you can add a DTV tuner card and software yourself. Or you can buy a ready-to-record Windows Media Center PC such as HP’s z557 Digital Entertainment Center ($2,600) or the Niveus Media Center–Denali Edition ($4,799). Both have dual-layer DVD recorders that can save a 1-hour HDTV show already recorded to the PC’s hard drive to a DVD+R Dual Layer disc. (You can’t record directly to the DVD.) A DL disc holds 8.4 GB — enough for The Tonight Show but not a movie. Since the recordings are in the Windows Media Video–High Definition (WMV-HD) format, you can’t play them on regular DVD players or recorders.

Earlier this year, I recorded episodes of Arrested Development and Star Trek: Enterprise on the Niveus system. I copied them onto DVD+R DL discs and played them on the HP PC. The quality of the copied programs was identical to those on the hard drive. (But two other Windows XP computers I tried couldn’t read the discs at all.) Unfortunately, you can’t use a Media Center PC to make recordings from your high-def cable and satellite receiver.