My mom (82 years old) is still using a VCR with a tuner box. We are concerned about it wearing out, the tapes no longer being sold, etc.. She just spent $65 on a 9 pack of tapes from Amazon that could have gone to a new setup and she is saying she wants to get another VCR for backup. But they haven't been made in years, so it would already be used. I have a linux computer running VDR with a couple of dual ATSC dual tuner cards. But it needs to be rebuilt/reinstalled and I haven't messed with it in so long, I would have to learn it all over again and I'm not as good at figuring stuff out as I used to be and money is tight.
You can get VDR/Linux images ready to go for a Raspberry pi which cost about $35. Add a USB Tuner and a USB drive and you have a digital recorder system. And if I ever get mine rebuilt, they could be linked and share tuners and drive space. But it's complicated and time consuming to setup for me atm.
These ready made units would be simpler to get going, but a good one would cost more and be more complicated for her to use. I still have to setup timers for recording with the VCR.
I'm looking for recommendations/options/opinions. While the local over the air guide is mostly a mess, sometimes not sending out the prime time data till nearly noon of that day, we'd want to avoid having to sub to any service to keep cost down. Needs to be local recording, be able to use local guide data and when needed setup blind recordings as done on VCRs, and would be nice if you could plug and remove USB drives/sticks for longer term storing recordings. From what I've seen, these ready made systems don't really like media swapping.