Thanks, Gargoyle, but I wasn't actually talking about copying DVDs onto the hard drive and re-recording them as VCD, or any of those kind of workarounds - I was asking about these new IDE drives you can plug in and use in the same way you use a CD-RW - in fact, they also write CDs.

They seem to have two probs, though - they record disks ok but the disks won't play on 'legacy' systems (ie the glossy new one you just bought six months ago to watch DVDs on your TV), and they're region-blocked so they decide only to play or record DVDs from one particular region of the world.