I just bought a cheap broken DVR from eBay and thought to share pictures from inside the unit since there aren't any on the Internet. It was a state of the art unit at the beginning of 2000, probably costing several thousands of dollars. Some documents and review from that time praise the wavelet-type encoding quality and savings, custom-made ATX power supply and build quality. I beg to differ on a few fronts.
Electronics and programming interspersed at various levels of difficulty.