Through mutual technology transfer between consumer and professional video recorders, the last 20 years has witnessed a rapid evolution from analog to digital recording. Each new digital videotape recorder (VTR) uses different channel coding. This implies that improving the recording density involves the development of new channel-coding schemes together with evolutionary magnetic tapes and heads. As a result, professional digital VTR's offer the best features for video recording. This paper reviews state-of-the-art magnetic recording devices, signal processing techniques for digital recording. It also describes the specifications for home-use digital recorders for current television systems, and discusses disk recording technology in the future. >