Once you download a tv show, is there a way to rip it onto a dvd-r and watch it in a conventional player?
Just get yourself an Apple TV. The quality of video is pretty good if you have a video that was recently placed on iTunes. If I need to make a dvd, I just play it on my video iPod and feed it directly to the DVD recorder. Supposely there is a hack out there to do this directly but I have not found it yet.
My laptop has a TV out (S-video). I watch downloaded iTunes on my TV that way, but you could just as easily burn it on a DVD recorder. I did a small amount of research on this some time ago and didn’t come up with a way to do it all on a desktop w/ DVD burner though.