DVD Recorders

[Rob P]

Decided its time to buy a DVD recorder and need some advice. Lots of techy advice on the interweb but no answers to my questions on how you can us the things!

Planning to get a mid range recorder upto £150, any recommendations?

Also, how well do DVD-RW perform? I guess they only last x amount of recordings before they are rendered useless?
Can you record as many "sessions" on a DVD R disc until its full or is it a case of doing it in one go? i.e can you record programs over a few weeks until the disc is full then just chuck it in the bin once you have finished with it?

Any advice greatfully received as usual

[rodney59]

take a read of this www.videohelp.com/dvdrecorders

[squirrelz]

I've got a Panasonic DMR E20D, which is a freeview DVD recorder. You can get them from www.rgbdirect.co.uk or www.prcdirect.co.uk for £154, and they use DVD-RAM DVD-R DVD-RW (I think its - and not + ....)

Quite pleased with it, only oddities are no ability to delete digital channels that its detected, and the fact you have to put it in timer mode to record.

you can get up to 8 hours on a disk at lowest quality, 4 hours at medium quality, or 2 hours at high quality, as well as doing stuff like adjusting the quality setting to the best possible for the available space on the disk.

Theres chase play, so you can start playing back before a recording has finished.

And unlike freeview hard disk recorders, you can also record off sky or cable STB's as well.

[squirrelz]

Rob P said:

Also, how well do DVD-RW perform? I guess they only last x amount of recordings before they are rendered useless?

I think its quite a lot of record/erase cycles - I've got one DVD-RW that I used to use for watching TV programs I'd recorded on a PC or downloaded, and must have cycled it 30 times so far without problems.

Rob P said:

Can you record as many "sessions" on a DVD R disc until its full or is it a case of doing it in one go? i.e can you record programs over a few weeks until the disc is full then just chuck it in the bin once you have finished with it?

No idea - I've got 4 RAM disks and one RW so I've not had to use any DVDRs so far. Don't forget you can only get 4 hours on a disk at reasonable quality.

[scorp]

Rob P said:

Can you record as many "sessions" on a DVD R disc until its full or is it a case of doing it in one go? i.e can you record programs over a few weeks until the disc is full then just chuck it in the bin once you have finished with it?

It may depend on the player, the one i have (philips something or other) allows an unlimited number of "sessions" to be recorded (you can also edit them), however it works by writing data to the inner part of the disc in a non-standard format (not readable by any other drive or player). You then "finalise" the disc to make it readable on a normal DVD player, the disc is no longer writeable when finalised. As mentioned you can edit all the blocks of recordings, this is dead usefull, you can re-arrange the order, delete recordings, edit a individual recording, relabel a recording (it creates a DVD menu too!), etc.

[scorp]

squirrelz said:

And unlike freeview hard disk recorders, you can also record off sky or cable STB's as well.

Except sky-box office, my player adheres to the macrovision protection system Sky use to block recording of premium content you have already paid for

[Rob P]

Thanks for the replies.

I think a Panasonic DDR3305 or something is my choice. It got the "best budget" award in one of the magazines for under £200. Tesco et al are selling them at £129 at the mo so will snap one of those up.