......."If you ran into the audio inputs on the back with the rca's and just recorded audio, what ends up on the disc? What format is it?....."
It ends up on the recorded dvd as an empty video ts file (if you have no video input hooked to the recorder as you're recording) and a linked audio ts file. Unplayable on anything other than a dvd player (once finalized that is).
Also, the ts files themselves can not be copied to a computer and subsequently read by standard music software as if they were standalone music files. The ts files would have to first be transcoded (which degrades the file) into components that could eventually be converted a further time and stripped down to isolate the embedded wav files. However, the wav files....now degraded...would be at 48k (the video standard) which would then have to be converted to 16 bit 44.1...and onward. There are ways of extracting exisiting stereo/surround music tracks out of commercial product, but that's a different story than starting at home and recording in to a set of dvd rca inputs. Further to all this mess, the a/d converters on a $79.00 dvd recorder represent about $7 converters. Not exactly top of the line for audio work. In fact, the quality is probably several magnitudes below bottom-of-the-line stuff.