Hopefully I will get somewhere near that kind of setup with my next TV. See... my problem currently is that my 31" Mitsubishi TV (tube type and about 14 years old now) only has a single svideo input.

I have to keep things easy to operate at my house or everyone complains and quite frankly they get frustrated when they can't figure out how to simply watch a dvd movie or watch satellite TV. SO.... I do everything in the A/V receiver and I have a Harmony remote. If tehy want to watch satellite they hit the TV button and the remote sets it all up for them. If they want to watch a DVD they hit the movie button on the remote and it switches everything over so they are watching the DVD.

At this point I am not terribly concerned about being able to record to the DVD recording while watching something else from a different source. If we need to do this such that you can only record to DVD when you are ONLY recording to DVD....that's ok.

In the manual for my receiver it shows a VCR being connected to that video2 section. (Video2 has both input and output). I guess I'm hoping that I can take a DVD recorder and connect it to that video2 the same way as I now have the VCR in there. The VCR would get replaced by the DVD recorder.

Eventually, when we replace this TV, I hope to have one with more inputs and be able to do something more along the lines of what you describe. My current TV is just too old to have all of those inputs on it :)