DVD-RAM is largely irrelevant because you'll have a hard time actually finding the media for purchase.

My father got himself a Sony DVD burner / VCR combo box last year and absolutely loves it. It can do time-shifting of shows to the VCR (as traditional) or to the DVD burner. It also has a single-button for dubbing, which is truly brilliant compared to the annoyance of doing it through your computer.

I recently burned 8 copies of baby videos on DVD-R to sent to family for the holidays. On my older Panasonic RP-56 DVD player (one of the early players to have decent progressive scan output), some of the discs work great and others have problems. I suspect that newer DVD players that explicitly know about DVD-R will work fine.