I complained about my Panasonic, but at least I could copy straight to DVD and then play it on my puter. Why have they made this so complicated?
Why have you made your posts so complicated by using a non-default font? Because you can!
Firstly, is your Panasonic an analogue TV PVR/DVD recorder? I have an analogue PVR/DVD, and it has to digitise the incoming video which is then formatted into the file structure which is standard for DVDs, so it can either record straight to DVD or onto hard drive and be able to copy to DVD later.
A digital TV PVR is a simpler beast in that the video stream is already digital and needs no conversion, just copying to disk. Unfortunately the format used in the broadcast is called Transport Stream (TS) and is not DVD compatible. That would not stop you copying it as data to a USB stick (or DVDR via some external device) and playing it through a suitable media player (VLC 2.0, Splash Player Lite, and XBMC recommended for PC), but first you have to overcome content protection.
This is imposed by the licence to use EPG data for recording scheduling. All recordings are encrypted on the Humax disk, StDef recordings are decrypted when copied to a USB drive and can then be played by the aforementioned programs on a PC, HiDef recordings require a little intervention before you can do the same - check out the background reading linked in my signature panel below (which is why it says "new readers click here").
Copying a TS file to a DVDR
will never create a DVD playable in an ordinary DVD player - first it has to be converted to VOB (the correct video encoding for DVD players) and then it has to be written to the DVDR in the right way. An analogue PVR/DVD recorder does that for you, a digital PVR does not. Therefore the work flow to produce a DVD from TS is to import the TS into a video editor and then export a DVD. In my case Serif MoviePlus does not import TS so I convert to MPG first (which is much simpler than TS/MPG conversion to VOB).