The AM Forum

Hi !

I have a Panasonic Hard Drive and DVD recorder/player.  It's great!  The hard drive will hold somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 hours of video material (recorded at standard resolution - as good as analog TV, or maybe even a bit better - the quality is excellent)...  Of course, it's a few years old, and has an analog tuner, etc.  I have a DTV box hooked up to it, so I can record.

NO cable or pay TV here - everything is off the air DTV.

I've looked around at BestBuy, etc., and apparently there is no equiv. unit available for DTV - nothing.  The only answer I've been given involves using a computer - yes, it will certainly work, but I don't want to use a computer.

There are units that will record on DVD-RW and such, but you only get about 2 hours of recording time, and this is rather limited.  Also, it's just nice to have the hard drive, with all that space, and program storage, editing, etc.

Anyone have any ideas?

I'm not a big video guy - we don't watch a lot of TV (about an hour/week), and we don't have a lot of media toys around, but it is very nice to be able to record something at a moment's notice, for a long time (sometimes hours), and watch it later (perhaps WITHOUT the pledge breaks, and so on  ;)  )   Or, program the unit to record some program at a preset time, on a preset channel - which I can't do with the external DTV box that must be pre-set to a specific channel ahead of time.

Thanks and Regards,

Steve

I have one at work. I'll check it on Monday to see if it fits your app.

DVR?

How about these: http://dvr.about.com/od/dvrs/tp/toppicks2.htm

Yes!  That appears to be the ticket!

Thanks for the link and the info.  I have all of these Panasonic DVD-RAM disks around (which is specific to Panasonic, I think)... now, if I could read those too  :D

Thanks again - from the info, it appears as if I can in fact get what I am looking for.

Regards,

Steve

I have a DVD recorder, Panasonic. It has s-video input and output as well as component out. The deficiency is that it has no component input. There was some talk about limiting the quality of recodring capability, for our own good, in order to reduce pracy. Maybe I should look into a spindle based DVR. I'm only interested in those that can take analog component, because the digital signals all see to have DRM built into them. I worked too long at Sony Broadcast so maybe I am spoiled. As for Tivo, the subscription fee is unattractive. One guy at work did manage to hack the Tivo and put a bigger HD in as well as free it from dependency on the fees paid.

Stand-alone component recorders in a reasonable price range don't seem common.

The seemingly best thing involving a PC is this "recorder" that takes video/s-video/component in and makes 480i or 480p from it and records via USB to quicktime format on a PC.
http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/videorecorder/download/

From there, the PC can scale and play back the video to a projector or big monitor.

Considering most DVDs are in 480-line format, this is acceptable for getting the best playback. HD is a totally different animal cost wise.

Another interesting option to go with this kind of scenario is a scan converter. Most downgrade the signals from HD or VGS to TV resolution. Going the other way, such as from component (DVD player) to XGA and using a good monitor or projector is OK for me.

For your consideration:

http://www.dishnetwork.com/dtvpal/dvr.shtml (http://www.dishnetwork.com/dtvpal/dvr.shtml)

http://www.solidsignal.com/prod_display.asp?prod=DTVPalDVR (http://www.solidsignal.com/prod_display.asp?prod=DTVPalDVR)

Terry

– 1 set of Component (YPbPr) HD analog video outputs.. nice!