Interesting article on DVD recorders (1 Viewer)

[jcroy]

Also: With most cable companies, even if you purchase/own your PVR, all of the programs you may have archived on it will become inaccessible should you ever cancel your service.

This can also happen if the dvr is unplugged for several days.

One time I left the dvr unplugged for several days. When I plugged it back in, the first screen which shows up says to call the cable provider for validation. It was basically a dumb brick until validation was performed again by the cable provider.

 

[DaveF]

Are you serious? It is that difficult to move every 5 hours? And what is the hard drive capacity of your PVR that you can load it up with that much and still have room for other shows. Is that HD? What if you want to see this show in 5 years and it is erased by then?

Yes.

I’m not home 24/7 to swap a tape...disc... every five hours for a 48 hr marathon. Nor am I getting up at 3 am to swap a disc because the previous one got started at 10pm.

My Tivo has 3TB drive. It can hold about 150 hours of HD content. Last year I had on it all of the Twilight Zone series and also the first ten seasons of Supernatural. And also half of Burn Notice. And a season of The Expanse. And all the shows we watch weekly.

If it’s a show I want to keep longer term, I copy it from the Tivo to my media computer. I do that with some few things.

 

[Ron Lee Green]

But don’t you have to be there to put in a new disc every four or five hours? And then you’ve got a stack of discs to label and store and deal with. Like in the good old days of VCRs?

With a DVR, I recorded a 48 hour “Twilight Zone ”New Year’s Day marathon, in HD, with the press of a button. Then watched the series at my leisure over the next two years.

My recorder has a built-in hard drive. It's a Magnavox HDD and Recorder MR513H. I've had it for 7 years. I can store hundreds of hours on it. It will record something non-stop up to 12 hours, so I don't have to be there to put in a disc. every 4 or 5 hours. Then, if I want, I can edit out the commercials and burn (or dubb) it to disc. I only do this if its a rare show that's not available on DVD (like Family). IF it was the Twilight Zone, I wouldn't bother editing and burning it. If I wanted it that bad, I would just buy the retail set because the quality is better..

 

[DaveF]

I've been planning on getting a blu-ray burner for my computer -- mostly to be able to make HD copies of video from my HD video camera. Since my children were born, I've taken a lot of HD video, but I have no way to share it with other family members in HD without a blu-ray burner. (Any suggestions on Mac-compatible blu-ray burners would be much appreciated!)

Why discs?

Edit movie. Copy to thumb drive. Plug drive into port on TV or disc player or streaming device.

Post movie to cloud service and they can watch on mobile device or computer of choice.

Post to YouTube in private gallery. Distribute to family. They can watch via very internet connected device in the house.

Post video to Facebook.


Conversely: Friend made DVD to show family video to in-laws who have no computer, no internet, only DVD players connected by coax to Tube TVs. DVD is solution, right? Bog standard burned disc in normal dvd format wouldn’t play in their two players. Drive the hour to Walmart and bought two new blu-ray players and two new HDTV sets! Homemade DVDs still wouldn’t play on new hardware.

A simple thumb drive of videos would have plugged into new devices and played.

 

[DaveF]

Thanks for info on the DVD DVRs. I didn’t know they had drive-based recorders. That makes a lot more sense!

 

[TJPC]

Why discs?

Edit movie. Copy to thumb drive. Plug drive into port on TV or disc player or streaming device.

Post movie to cloud service and they can watch on mobile device or computer of choice.

Post to YouTube in private gallery. Distribute to family. They can watch via very internet connected device in the house.

Post video to Facebook.


Conversely: Friend made DVD to show family video to in-laws who have no computer, no internet, only DVD players connected by coax to Tube TVs. DVD is solution, right? Bog standard burned disc in normal dvd format wouldn’t play in their two players. Drive the hour to Walmart and bought two new blu-ray players and two new HDTV sets! Homemade DVDs still wouldn’t play on new hardware.

A simple thumb drive of videos would have plugged into new devices and played.

I have never had problems playing any DVD I have made that was properly finalized. I am afraid your friend didn’t know what he was doing. You must simply click “finalize” to make the disc playable on everything.

Your way, by the way sounds hopelessly and bewilderingly complicated to me.

 

[Dan McW]

I have never had problems playing any DVD I have made that was properly finalized. I am afraid your friend didn’t know what he was doing. You must simply click “finalize” to make the disc playable on everything.

Your way, by the way sounds hopelessly and bewilderingly complicated to me.

What's the best way (or is there a way) to finalize DVD-R's when the original DVD recorder they were recorded on is no longer functioning?

 

[AndyMcKinney]

(Any suggestions on Mac-compatible blu-ray burners would be much appreciated!)

Sam:
This is what I have, installed in the second optical bay of my MacPro (as shown in the photo). I've had it for a few years now, was surprised to see they're apparently still selling them.

If you don't have the MacPro tower (the only relatively modern Mac with internal expansion for optical drives), if you click on the 'products' tab, you'll see that they also have external products available.

Having it as a secondary optical in the MacPro sure is handy, in case I also want to burn another disc in the other drive at the same time.

Besides the drive, you will also need burning software, particularly if you want to use DVD-R discs for HD content. Since I'm running some older software on this MacPro for other reasons (so, it's OS is still at Snow Leopard), I bought an older copy of Toast on Amazon fairly cheaply (I think it was Toast 11). Then, I went online to the Toast website to purchase the special add-on HD plugin that you need to enable the HD-on-DVD burning. I think that was only $15-20.

Most HD recording I've done has been TV shows from MP4, TS, MKV, etc., but I have also used it to burn a disc from some of my first HD-shot home videos (a trip to Niagara Falls). I exported the footage to iMovie (I think, the iLife08 version) and did all my editing there.I don't remember if I was able to burn directly to disc from there, or if I had to export to a format that I could just pull into Toast and burn.

 

[Tony Bensley]

What's the best way (or is there a way) to finalize DVD-R's when the original DVD recorder they were recorded on is no longer functioning?

Barring being able to get the exact same DVD Recorder model, I'd say whoever has those unfinalized discs would be sol in regards to getting them finalized. I do recall putting this to the test about a decade ago when my first used DVD Recorder quit on me after about 8 months. While I seem to recall an ability to make the non finalized discs playable on the new Toshiba DVD Recorder (I don't recall the brand name of the used DVD Recorder, except that it was a different one!), I was unable to finalize them for general playback on other DVD Players.

CHEERS!

 

[TJPC]

I have two Magnavox DVD recorders purchased a couple of years apart, and even they don’t recognize each other’s unfinalized discs.

 

[DaveF]

Your way, by the way sounds hopelessly and bewilderingly complicated to me.

My post made it sound more complex than it is. It's easy.

Make video as you normally do, and export from video editor

Then:
1) copy to thumb drive
2) plug thumb drive into TV, streaming box, blu-ray player, etc. and play video

Or:
1) Share video on Facebook

Or:
1) Upload to YouTube

Or:
1) Share it in an iCloud album (I'm sure there's a Google equivalent)

And so on. There are a few more one or two step solutions to sharing videos.

I've made DVDs with menus and stuff before. All of the above is easier for me than authoring a DVD.

 

[DaveF]

I have never had problems playing any DVD I have made that was properly finalized. I am afraid your friend didn’t know what he was doing. You must simply click “finalize” to make the disc playable on everything

Don't know. Very smart technically savvy guy made a DVD. It played in his home players, including his car. Took it to technophobic in-laws and it didn't work. Would have been easier to made a thumb drive with videos and plug into the new TVs they had to buy anyway.

 

[Ron1973]

I'll second the thumb drive solution. I have almost 24 hours worth of The Beverly Hillbillies on a thumb drive; some are not the greatest picture quality (dubbed from VHS), but I can't tell a difference between it and burning a DVD of the same shows. You also have the ability to remove a show/shows from the thumb drive. If, for instance, CBS releases S5 soon, I can remove those episodes from my drive.

 

[smithbrad]

My post made it sound more complex than it is. It's easy.

Make video as you normally do, and export from video editor

Then:
1) copy to thumb drive
2) plug thumb drive into TV, streaming box, blu-ray player, etc. and play video

Or:
1) Share video on Facebook

Or:
1) Upload to YouTube

Or:
1) Share it in an iCloud album (I'm sure there's a Google equivalent)

And so on. There are a few more one or two step solutions to sharing videos.

I've made DVDs with menus and stuff before. All of the above is easier for me than authoring a DVD.

It all comes down to what one feels most comfortable doing. I'd much rather burn to a DVD-R's or BD-R's to create a more permanent solution that i can also dupe to share, but I might do a thumb drive as a quick and dirty option. I've had no problem sharing DVD-R's, but I have come across situations when thumb drive capability was not available while a DVD player was.

 

[smithbrad]

I'll second the thumb drive solution. I have almost 24 hours worth of The Beverly Hillbillies on a thumb drive; some are not the greatest picture quality (dubbed from VHS), but I can't tell a difference between it and burning a DVD of the same shows. You also have the ability to remove a show/shows from the thumb drive. If, for instance, CBS releases S5 soon, I can remove those episodes from my drive.

I agree thumb drives are generally more portable and easy to swap things on and off of, but I wouldn't want it to be my primary storage device for anything. Also, there can be limitation in file size since most situations I've had required them to be formatted to FAT32, which has file size limitations.

 

[Ron1973]

I agree thumb drives are generally more portable and easy to swap things on and off of, but I wouldn't want it to be my primary storage device for anything. Also, there can be limitation in file size since most situations I've had required them to be formatted to FAT32, which has file size limitations.

Oh, heck no, I completely agree! Everything is backed up on my computer AND an external hard drive as well! I'm well prepared on my videos, pictures, and music!

 

[DaveF]

It all comes down to what one feels most comfortable doing. I'd much rather burn to a DVD-R's or BD-R's to create a more permanent solution that i can also dupe to share, but I might do a thumb drive as a quick and dirty option. I've had no problem sharing DVD-R's, but I have come across situations when thumb drive capability was not available while a DVD player was.

That’s definitely part of it for me: I don’t have particularly high trust for burned DVDs. I’ve had glitchy TV DVDs that a friend burned from his DVD DVR type device in the past. Digital content that goes on to my computers is at least stable on the RAID, and potentially triply backed up locally and in the cloud.

I’m also increasingly surrounded by friends and colleagues who have roughly zero interest in physical media.

YMMV

 

[jcroy]

Oh, heck no, I completely agree! Everything is backed up on my computer AND an external hard drive as well! I'm well prepared on my videos, pictures, and music!

(This may sound really silly).

Back in the day when I was really young, my form of "storage" for music was transcribing the guitar (or vocal) parts myself and playing it back again many times on the guitar.

Fast foward to the present, suprisingly I still remember how to play just about every piece of music I transcribed or wrote. This is after more than 25+ years of not playing any musical instruments regularly.

 

[Ron1973]

That’s definitely part of it for me: I don’t have particularly high trust for burned DVDs. I’ve had glitchy TV DVDs that a friend burned from his DVD DVR type device in the past. Digital content that goes on to my computers is at least stable on the RAID, and potentially triply backed up locally and in the cloud.

I’m also increasingly surrounded by friends and colleagues who have roughly zero interest in physical media.

YMMV

I know this is sacrilege, but I am coming to that point. This past Christmas season, I found most every LP I owned was available on YouTube in complete form. I know the argument is that the streaming doesn't sound as good, but in many cases, it bested my old LP's. I'm just to a point I'd rather have everything on my computer provided that I can back it up to another external drive.

 

[jcroy]

I know this is sacrilege, but I am coming to that point. This past Christmas season, I found most every LP I owned was available on YouTube in complete form. I know the argument is that the streaming doesn't sound as good, but in many cases, it bested my old LP's. I'm just to a point I'd rather have everything on my computer provided that I can back it up to another external drive.

Some further sacrilege.

Nowadays I find myself listening more to covers of stuff I grew up listening to, than the original versions. Mostly stuff found on youtube featuring genY or millenials singing/playing covers of 60s, 70s or 80s classic songs, recorded with modern recording technology.

Stuff like covers of Led Zeppelin, Beatles, Ozzy Osbourne, Metallica, Stones, Michael Jackson, etc ... songs done by millenials.