I record almost everything I watch and I hate commercials and appreciate fast-forwarding past them. Presently I have Cox with the Contour box (works well, can record 2 channels while watching 1 live) that uses cloud storage for the recordings through Panoramic Wifi Gateway. My promotional discounts end soon and as I am older & enjoy local live sports too, I would like to stick with Cox cable for most TV. Cox implies I need their wifi modem/router combo for the DVR service. Advice?
Not sure where you are located but locally you definitely need the Cox box to use their DVR. We got sick of having to go into their brick and mortar every time the discount was ending to plead for a new discount (it does work but it is work). We went with YouTubeTV. Their cloud based DVR works well for us. My husband watches some sports. We get local channels. You might want to look at what they offer. Because there are only two of us, we were actually able to make my mother part of our TV household. (YouTubeTV gives you three streams.) That meant she was able to drop her basic Cox TV too.
I do not have YouTubeTV but found that I can download their movies. I used to have an addon in the browser that did it but then bought a copy of VideoDownloader from Easeus through a discount.
I download videos and items directly from Youtube, but only the free ones since I don’t pay for Youtube prime or whatever they call it. You can try the software for free. Then go to StackSocial.Com and get a lifetime (3 devices) license for $25. You may also get a discount from that with StackSocial.Com on top of the discounted price.
I can verify that their software works as I have downloaded thousands of short videos and some long movies in various formats like MP4 from Youtube. It also supports other platforms and works on Windows and Mac. I use it on Win7 but it will work on all later versions.