Help with all this digital stuff?

[M Holmes]

Since my trusty tape player died at Hawkfest, I've been persuaded by
some of the denizens here (the guilty know who they are) to enter the
digital age with these newfangled M3P and hard disc thingies. I've
therefore bought an AV380 (see www.archos.com). This has a hard disc and
permits external microphone use. My attempt to just use it without any
manual reading ended in abject failure in the form of a recording so
distorted that Dave Anderson would be ashamed to release it.

So after 3 hours of reading manuals, I have questions. Mainly these are
about MP3's and what form CD tracks normally arrive in. There appear to
be different kinds of MP3 based on bitrates, sampling frequencies, and
lord knows what else. Is there a site with a non-geek level of
explanation of all this, codecs and whatnot? Basically I want to now
what settings to use the microphone on, and what settings to use to
store music on the hard disc. I'm told that Itunes converts between all
these different formats anyway?

While I'm ice-climbing the learning curve, a trusty VCR also died.
Looking at the options, I think the thing to buy in replacement would be
a PVR that's a combination hard disk video recorder and DVD recorder.
This seems to offer a nice choice to watch-n-delete or to save anything
that's particulartly good to a beermat that takes a lot less room than a
VHS tape.

Of course I'm then faced with 5 different recording formats for DVD
(only 5?). Anywhere I can find out about those?

Also, the Archos widget mentioned above will record movies as well as
MP3's. This is handy for taking films to watch while I'm away. However,
seems I have to play a film on a VCR and transfer it to the widget in
real time to its MP4 (avi?) format. The widget however does take (with
an adapter) flashcards. Seems that some of these DVD/HDD recorders do
too. Presumably I could move films from one to the other via the
flashcards much more quickly? However the HDD/DVD units that I've seen
seem to record in MP2 format rather than MP4. The Archos won't play MP2.
Am I likely to find a DVD/HDD which records in MP4 or is there some
reason why the companies won't do that?

Anyway, plenty of questions to go. Thanks in advance for any advice or
web sites which will get this old fart into the digital age.

FoFP