When I travel I like to watch movies on my phone, and our DVR is packed with movies we love, so we looked for a way to get those movies off our DVR so I can make a phone compatible version to take with me.

We headed over to Fry's Electronics on Las Vegas Blvd. and came across the AVerTV USB HD DVR. Here is the product description provided by the manufacturer:

Record 1080i HD Video to Your PC
IT connects your cable / satellite set-top box thru component video, you can easily record all your favorite TV shows to your PC by AVerMedia Scheduler. Even better, you can capture your video game play in H.264 video format and share them online!

HD Video Playback on TV or PC
You may directly output HD recordings from the PC to TV via HDMI connection without the need of burning to disc. It is an eco-friendly design which you can benefit from saving time and effort.

Create Your Own AVCHD* Disc
Need to archive your video collections? You can now burn your favorite High Definition TV shows or video onto DVD disc in AVCHD format. Play them back and share with your friends anytime.
*AVCHD stands for Advanced Video Coding High Definition

Watch Favorite Shows On the Go
The included ArcSoft MediaConverter program can also help you convert the recordings to other formats compatible for playback on an iPhone, iPod, PSP, Zune, and much more popular devices.

The set up chart you get in the instructions does a great job of laying out the connection steps.

First you plug it into a power source, use the supplied composite cable (RCA cable) to go from your DVR to the device and each cable is color-coded so you can't mess up.

What also is nice about the AVerTV USB HD DVR is it comes with video conversion software (ArcSoft MediaConverter7) so after you capture the video you want, you can convert it to a number of different formats so you can burn it on a DVD, Blue-ray, or like me, a format I can use on my phone.

For all this you might expect to pay a fortune but no we paid around $200, and I am sure we will get our money's worth out of this new gadget.

Here is a great demonstration video by Buy.com

For an in-depth look here is the link to download the datasheet in PDF format.

So if you are a movie lover and your DVD is quickly filling up, unload some of those movies to your computer, so you can use them on other devices as you see fit.