Digital Video Recorder

A digital video recorder (DVR) is a device that records video in a digital format to a disk drive or other medium. The term includes stand-alone set-top boxes and software for personal computers which enables video Capture to and from disk.

DVRs are generally used for the same sorts of tasks that a VCR would have been used for just a few years ago. They're commonly used for recording television and security cameras.

DVRs can record either analog or digital signals, although generally not both. Recording an analog signal requires capturing it and encoding to some digital format, typically MPEG-2 but sometimes other formats like MPEG-4 are used. When recording a digital signal, a DVR typically just saves the audio and video streams exactly as received.

PVR, or Personal Video Recorder is another term sometimes used to describe a DVR. Although the name doesn't specify a digital recording, the two terms are equivalent.

Most HTPCs are also DVRs.