The hard drives user interface (menu's, etc) is very basic, but effective and user-friendly. Each recording session is saved a title, which you can split into however many, and chaptors are piss easy to put in. You can get rid of unwanted stuff like commerical breaks, etc aswell, which saves disc space. Chapters, you can place just about anywhere in the program, so I just aim for commercial breaks and just delete the breaks after.

I tend to use Maxewell discs which are cheap and tend to be the most recommended brand, but I do use Tesco's own disc aswell cause they're cheaper, lol. I have 2 other DVD players which the discs both work on, though playback on a PlayStation 2 and some DVD-ROM drives can be a bit iffy. Go for DVD+R aswell. Basically, any sort of superstore, not just computer stores, will sell just the right type of discs you want, as they're for the "average" customer I suppose. I'm quite a techno-wizz myself, but I do like to keep things simple.

As for Up-Conversion, I have no idea, never heard of it! lol. Judging by the name, I assume it means improving picture quality?

Hope this has been helpfull!