Sorry if this has been asked before but the search feature would not accept the term "VCR" because of it being 3 letters. I was just wondering if there is another thread you can point me to or a short answer someone could give me about properly hooking up a VCR to a receiver/home theatre setup. I am interested in setting it up so that I can record without having to directly put my cable line in the VCR and then branching from there to the Monitor. I thought this could be done using the VCR input to output on the receiver and VCR output to input on the receiver, however, it does not seem to be working. I can record when I branch the cable but then either have to leave the VCR on to watch TV or split the cable and have one branch going to the monitor directly and the other going to the VCR directly. Is it absolutely nessecary to run the cable directly to the VCR in order for me to record programming or can this be achieved through the method prescribed above (of using RCA cables for input and output)? If not, then what is the purpose of hooking up both the input and output (of the VCR) to the reciever?

Thanks in advance,
Arkru

You basically answered your own question.

The cable is the signal for the VCR, ie., that is what you want to record. Unless your receiver can direct a signal to a specific input you will need to run that dignal through the VCR. The only way to watch something else is if you have an input selector on your receiver so that you could have the VCR recording cable but you are watching a DVD on a different input.

To answer your other question, the purpose of the input/output on the receiver is to take a signal from a source, again the VCR, and move it somwhere else, ie., a TV.

The input could in theory be used to record material that was going through the receiver itself although macrovision prevents you from doing that with DVD's. If your receiver has front panel jacks you could connect another VCR or Camcorder there to send a signal into the VCR for recording.

Good luck!

Thanks for the quick reply. I kind of figured I would have to branch the cable off in all those directions, but thanks for clearing things up, it was much appreciated.