VHS Recorder Replacement

It would be nice to be able to record onto portable media without being gaoled for piracy, but i doubt that will happen in your country or mine.

Piracy laws are really unclear for a lot of things. For example, you can download an emulator for a game if you already own/owned a physical copy. You can record tv as long as you don't plan on selling it; however, some stations won't let you without exclusive rights... It's really just a convoluted mess right now

The piracy laws in the U.K. may not be as hazy. Also i imagine he is talking about the recording of movies. This would be illegal even in the U.S. unless it was for your own use.

I have two PVRs as there quite often is four shows that i like to watch on at the same time. Each PVR has two tuners and can record two shows at once whilst you watch a third pre-recorded show but not a third broadcast. So with two machines i can record three shows and watch a fourth. Of course the time will come when there are five or more channels competing for the same timeslot with shows that i want to watch.

I don't know if it is possible to "play" a show/movie recorded on the PVR hard drive and copy it on a DVD writer at the same time, do you? Does HDMI enable this?

Jim

PVR? What's that, a personal video recorder?

DVR is the beast we use here. I'm not sure what you mean by play and copy at the same time but we can burn a DVD (on board the PVR) of anything that is recorded on the hard drive whether it is or isn't being watched or copy it to a USB memory.

The hard drive can be used as a generic external memory for connection to other devices as well eg a PC.

OK just checked. It is called PVR. Seems that DVR is the name for security camera system recorders. I've been calling it by the wrong name...

This was recently procured and it's a Samsung, I've forgotten its model number and specs but i do know it's good for 3 hours of recording.

DVD's do not give the re-use facility.

Maybe I misunderstand your statement, but there are rewritable DVDs - DVD+R/W and -R/W. So a DVD recorder would do what you want. If you want the capability to archive some of your viewing on DVDs you'll be a step closer to that process vs. trying to make a DVD from scratch from mpg's or vob's. Most DVD recorders allow for editing titles and on a +R/W disc you can split titles, too.

A DVD recorder with a built in hard disk will do the job. The bigger the hard disk the better....

Throw in a box of re-writable DVDs and you have a great system for the whole house....

DVDs are tomorrow's LP records.

Do it all on HDD or SSD.

If you can afford to buy several USB HDDs, then buy a receiver with a USB port and load them up directly from the Receiver....

SSD is for me personally still too expensive, but I occasionally buy a 2 TB hard disk from ebay for very little money......

You can also buy USB interfaces and buy almost any HD with the right interface and plug them in when you need them. You can use the same device for backing up important data on your computer.....naked hard disks are cheap.

I like ones like this because it promotes better cooling by standing the HD on end. This one is USB 3.0 compatible for really high speed transfers and costs around US$20:-

Yes, big capacity SSDs are not cheap yet.

What is a thumb drive if not a small capacity SSD?

500GB and even TeraB HDD are cheap now.

I did not realise that DVD-RW and DVD+RW could rewritten at least 1000 times according to Phillips http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Reviews/Specific.aspx?ArticleId=13934&PageId=11 and that most manufacturers guarantee 500 times so that may solve my problem so thanks to all replies.

At work we have to make at least 2 copies of any material that has to be stored for more than 2 years because we find that some CD's are unreadable after that length of time. On the other hand I have some 20 year floppy discs and tapes that read perfectly.

Open magnetic media gets ruined by mold and fungus in these parts. Not to mention magnets in the vicinity.

DVD/CD's also age.

1000/500 rewrites? Yeh right.

Bloody conspiracy.

I'm waiting for the brain in a bottle.

As long as they are stored in the dark and are NEVER left in the Sun, even for a minute, rewritable DVDs and CDs have a long life span. Even cheap no-name ones.....

But, what can cause errors is when recording data/films, usually only the beginning of the disk is used and there may be some area at the end of the data area that almost never gets written to. This can cause problems as the surface "ages", some parts are aged quicker simply because they are used more often....Basically both areas need a different adjustment of the laser power, but will not get it....

To stop this effect of having "aged" and less "aged" areas, about every 4 or 5 time you write the disk, do a full erase. This evens up the usage/aging.

An average (good) DVD Burner when writing, test writes a few bytes, reads back for validity, adjusts the laser power accordingly and writes all the data blind using only one adjustment (which is why you should always do a "verify read" automatically after writing to a disk, to make sure all the data was written, and written correctly. Verify is a bit by bit comparison).

If the burner had to read say each sector, after a write, it would take a really long time to check all the data while writing (as all good digital tape decks do, but they have two read heads! So its done on the fly.)

If you don't set up to do the validity checks and the occasional full erase, you might get into some serious data loss with rewritable DVDs and CDs......

Never ever set a CD or DVD down except either in the burner/reader, or in the box.

Both the top and bottom of DVDs and CDs are sensitive to damage, the lower surface will eventually become unreadable (as many games and music CD owners have already found out) with tiny scratches and if a hole is made in the upper surface reflection paint/metal coat, all data after this point "outwards" will become unreadable, although there are some programs around that can recover most of the data......but why go there?

Never take original music CDs in a car, copy them (I also convert them to MP3) and just use the copies, this foxes the people who will break into your car to get the good ones....I get up to 12 full CDs, in MP3 (CD quality) format on a single 700Mb CD worth a few cents.....