Another dumb question (1 Viewer)

[James C]

If you have separate units (Tivo and DVD Recorder), can you burn what you have recorded on Tivo? or must you have a Tivo Integrated unit (i.e. Pioneer, Toshiba or Humax)?

 

[Stephen Tu]

Certainly you can record to the other unit. There are two disadvantages though:
- there is a quality drop since you are going through another MPEG encoding cycle. If you are recording from cable & already know you want to save the show permanently it would be best to record straight to the DVD-R, or the DVD-R's hard drive if it has one.
- the transfer recording is in real time (1 hr for 1 hr show), and ties up the unit, can't watch another show while the burn happens.

But on the plus side you can edit the recordings, which can't be done currently on the Tivo/DVD-R combos, and is the prime reason I don't like them. And if you have a DirecTV/Tivo combo, there is no quality drop on the initial recording so it would work out equally on the video quality front.