DVD Recorder Help!

The Samsung cannot record two programs at the same. It has only one tuner. It can record only what you are viewing at the time or programs while your TV is off, if you loop it directly from your cable box and then into your TV. You have to purchase a DVR if you want a hard drive that will record another program while you are watching another. If you want to burn DVD's to save, you need a DMR, or a Digital Media Recorder. They will record onto a hard drive, onto a DVD-R, DVD-RW or DVD-Rom. DVD-RW and DVD-Rom are rewritable as long as you don't finalize them (so they can be played on almost any other DVD player). There's also an advantage to DVD-ROM cartridges as you can purchase them double-sided for consistently recording multiple programs and recording over them. Use the slower speeds and you get get a lot of hours on a DVD-ROM, although the quality drops with slower speeds.

Now, secondly, you can split the cable signal with a cable splitter and connect to the TV with one cable and to the DVD recorder with the other cable. Then you can program the DVD player to record when you are watching another channel on the TV, or at any other time, but only one program at a time.You have to connect the DVD player/recorder to your TV on one of the inputs. Composite uses one video RCA connector and the left and right connectors for stereo audio. S-VHS is a special connection that still works well with DVD to TV, but the better connection if your TV has an RGB component input is the red, green and blue RCA connections and the two stereo audio RCA connectors.

There are diagrams for this in your DVD player instructions.

I have a DMR, but not HD, of course, because there isn't DVD hi-def recording available yet. I find it convenient to record to the hard drive and then put in the selected DVD blank if I want to keep the program or free up space on the hard drive. A DVD-Rom comes in a cartridge which keeps away fingerprints and damage and these can be stores indefinitely or formatted (erased) and record new programming.

Have I confused you enough now?

You do realize that basic cable only gives you an analog signal and usually not a very good one. Without a cable box, you miss out and a multitude of channels, even if they are digital but not HD. The mandate for everything to be digital is February 2009, but that doesn't include everything being HD. However, many networks like TCM (Turner Classic Movies) will letter-box a wide screen movie so one can use the Zoom setting to fill the screen with at least close to a standard DVD quality picture. Shaw cable will have to provide all digital by Febuary 2009 or may already be if they do provide HDTV.

My question is -- what TV do you own?

Finally, I do have my DMR running off a split cable from the cable which means I can record with the cable box DVR, and record another channel on the DMR, or even burn a DVD at the same time.

How the hell are you LW?

I have three CRT TV's with the usual I/O's by various manufacturers.

I would use DVDRAM not DVDROM.

I don't know about the Hard Drive based units, so far they seem kinda lame as the HD's are pretty small given the additional cost and noise. I can get .5 TB for $100 I have four of em in my newest PC.

DVD recorders should simply have SATA2 I/O so I can use my external drives!

It sucks that DVD recorders do not have an analog bypass.

I don't care much about cable boxes / HDTV / satellite dishes / home theater. I know about Composite / S-VHS / RGB, I will use 'em if the I/O supports it but I don't really care that much about the quality differences (I know, call me boring and old-fashioned but when it comes to TV / video I like it really simple and basic.)

I would rather not mess with more splitters and I/O switch boxes just to watch cable TV while recording on DVDR because I have two active splitters in the basement feeding the various coax cable jacks throughout the house and I'd rather leave it at that.

Maybe I should just scrap everything and go modern but then I would be temped to watch too much TV / video. A goodly number of my friends do not even own / watch TV / videos and neither does my wife..........

So should I return the Samsung DVD-R115 and go more upscale I wonder?

Being a musician / electrician / computer nut I have often found it's makes sense to buy lower mid-level gear and replace it every 5 years than it is to go more upscale (closer to the "bleeding edge").

I would (and actually do) go with a Windows Media Center PC.

You can scale it as you like in terms of drive space (you can put additional drives anywhere on your network and start storing there) and you can do almost anything that any other product can do and more. You can stream your content (not just recorded TV but any music, pictures video and pretty much any media) to media center extenders (Xbox works for this as well) and do a hell of a lot more than with most standalone solutions.

Of course, it's less "plug and play" than a standalone solution but I strongly recommend it because you'll eventually want to do something that it does and if you are a computer nut it's not going to be a problem for you to work through the whole it being a computer part.

I am using wifi and have 3 PC's and 3 laptops.

All of them have specified single uses. Windows Media Center ruins the efficiency, simplicity and speed of my single purpose machines.

I originally was going to use the Hauppauge WinTV-USB2 TV Tuner with a laptop however the tuner is not that great, then I would have to deal with the laptop output interfacing with the TV, plus the SoftPVR application is not that great.

As to Windows Media Center, I find it invasive obtrusive and irritating.

I like well designed traditional stand-alone applications without fancy GUI's. I want my applications to have drop down menus with the correct technical nomenclature. I want to be able to wholly disable my applications whenever I want and not have them running in the background, or checking info on the 'net, or trying to associate themselves with every file under the sun, or auto-updating themselves etc.

I hate applications like Windows Media Center and Windows Media Player.

I hate them because they try and integrate / auto start / associate themselves with everything including the kitchen sink!

I hate them because I already have all my files arranged the way I want them, in the directories of my choice, I hate overbearing "nanny" applications like Windows Media Center with needless graphics and overly cute GUI's.

I hate all the Windows preconfigured directory structures that start with the word "My" and all the default directories that change with the whims of the latest MS OS, and the fact that I have to edit the Registry to get rid of the damn things.

I hate the fact that the Windows preconfigured directory structures and the applications that abide by the MS OS of the day all try and force you to have certain files types in certain given directories.

Barf to "My Music" and"My Pictures" and "My Documents" etc.

Barf to invasive overbearing resource hogging multimedia applications designed for people who would not know a Directory from a Cookie.

I like single applications designed for single purposes that do only exactly what I tell them to do and nothing more.

Although I dig PC's and networks, I am a stand-alone hands-on guy at heart.

Holy crap I am a ******* whiner, rant off!

Hey I do appreciate both you guy's input, it's interesting stuff and some day I might go PC based multimedia and / or home theater but.......

All I am after right now is an easy to use, inexpensive stand alone DVD recorder that will take the basic coax from Shaw Cable and hook up to most TV's.

I want the DVD recorder to work like a VCR. I want to be able to record a bunch of different TV programs at different time slots. It would be nice to be able to bypass the DVD recorder while it's recording so I can watch TV. In other words all the usual things VCR's used to do!

Questions:

1) I know that TV signals over the air will be going digital but does that mean basic coax from Shaw Cable will be going digital?

2) Should digital affect my choice of DVD recorder or future TV purchases?

3) Can the Samsung DVD-R115 record a bunch of different TV programs at different time slots like a VCR can?

The Samsung DVD-R115 is still in the box awaiting my decision.

Sony is producing a new component that is a computer combined with a multi-media recorder and player. I'd have to try and find it on Sony's site as I don't remember the model number and somehow did not put the info on this laptop. It is designed, of course, to connect to a big screen display. The hard drive capacity is huge.

Interesting!

I gotta wonder however how it would best a higher-end dedicated PC with suitable software and I/O cards. It's already a breeze to have 2 TB (I have 2 TB on my new PC).

Here's the link -- it ain't cheap:

SONY Server media storage

I'm most familiar with music software / hardware.

Some music companies have also tried the dedicated PC for music applications. They have met with very limited success because essentially they are simply repackaging off the shelf tech and charging a lot more for the "privilege" of the brand name.

I doubt Sony is doing anything much different. The truth is that desktops and laptops are pretty much commodities these days.

The Sony HES-V1000 only has a 1/2 TB drive, that is hardly huge by today's standards. A really good 1/2 TB drive is only $100.

Thus the Sony HES-V1000 has a $100 1/2 TB hard drive in it, big whoop!

For $3,499.99 I could do a lot better.

As for much that ballyhooed "200-disc Blu-ray Disc™/DVD/CD changer" I say big deal, just set up some 1 TB HD's in an array and forget about the CD changer altogether!

Perhaps most annoying would be that "200-disc Blu-ray Disc™/DVD/CD changer".

Why?

Not only is a bunch of the money gong to that proprietary clunker, but it's random access times and search functions would be a complete joke compared to HD's, plus the future of Blu-ray is dubious given other competition, plus it's proprietary and mechanical thus a failure means game over for any optical disc's you wanna play until expensive time consuming repairs are done.

The beauty of a cheap array of large HD's in combination with a few cheap internal optical drives can't be escaped. IMHO Sony's got it backwards!

Naturally Sony's interests lie in supporting Betamax (er-um Blu-ray), and in building a machine that limits the desire to copy to HD, hence that proprietary 200 disc clunker.

Changer drives went out of fashion about 10 years ago unsurprisingly with the advent of (relatively) cheap-large HD's.

Yeah, and the other purposes would nearly ruin the purpose of the Media Center box. I'd recommend a dedicated box for it and you can even get nice ones that look like home entertainment systems (though that will often take away any cost advantages of using a PC).

Here is a high-end example:

http://www.alienware.com/product_detail_pages/hangar18/hangar18_overview.aspx




Yeah, the output part is a pain unless you have a graphics card with DVI output and a TV/Screen that supports it. But both are fairly common with newer hardware.



So do I, but much less so than all other solutions.



I hear ya, but it's a trade off for smooth integration versus extensibility and flexibility.



I have my qualms with them, but I also have my qualms with all of it's alternatives for many of the same reasons.



So does a standalone device. For example, your VCR didn't let you associate certain kinds of media with your CD player. The only difference is if you don't intend to use the Media Center as a standalone device. If you do this is not a factor.



The alternative with standalone devices is no control at all over how and where your files are stored. Again this only matters if you use the Media Center for anything else.



Yeah, I hear ya. On many of my computers I have no files that I willfully put in the "My Documents" folder at all. I use a root folder in my C:/ drive.

However as irritating as that stuff is, it's essential for a multi-user system. They just take it a little far for the technically adept control freak.

But you don't need any registry tweaks, just don't put your files there. I haven't tried it recently but I think you can even change where you record your video from your Media Center's remote control without ever using a keyboard, much less a registry tweak.

I've never needed a registry tweak to work around all of what you've mentioned.



Resource hogging isn't an issue for a dedicated PC.



No kidding. But that's a software comparison issue and there's really no software that is in legitimate contention.



That's why I think you'd enjoy the extensibility and flexibility of a more complex software/hardware solution than a standalone device.



Mainly in the fact that it wouldn't be a semi-decent app layered over windows or another operating system.

While I recommend Media Center (despite agreement with much of your sentiments) it's still not as clean of an solution as a standalone device. If I remember correctly you need an admin account to run Media Center and an admin account needs a password, so you can't boot up the Media Center without entering a password. That's not as slick of a convergence as it should be.

I get around it by not turning off the PC (which you should do since it can only record scheduled recordings when on) but it's certainly not that slick.

But like I said, I take the lumps it gives for the flexibility and extensibility. I can add a TV card later, I can buy a device that hooks into the Media Center to change channels on a Cable Box if they scramble their content (e.g. pay-per-view channels, HBO etc), I can scale the storage linearly (on a NAS RAID array), I can use other programs (even running on other computers) like Miro to integrate content from Bittorrent (all legal of course), I can sync its content to almost any removable storage, and so on and so forth.

I'm not trying to convince you so much as play devil's advocate for others who may read this when faced with a similar decision but the networking, commodity hardware and extensibility are the benefits to this kind of solution (other than the all-in-one integration).

I am back to the drawing board after moving to a new continent and selling/giving away my old media setup but when I rebuild my entertainment center it will have one device (a PC) connected to a TV (and possibly split-screened to another LCD like my last setup) instead of a stack of standalone devices I can't upgrade, change or smoothly integrate.

I may pair it with a DVD changer (like the Sony VGP-XL1B2 Media Changer I looked at long ago) not as a hard-drive replacement but as DVD storage or even as an auxiliary storage solution. For example I'd probably want to store recorded TV on disc for the kind of stuff that I'd not want to keep but if I'm keeping it forever I'd rather go with 50 cents per 5GB instead of disc arrays.

I'd also scale the solution into a whole-home solution with networking and a media extender (may even go with an xbox since it's about the same price as the others I've seen and does more) eventually because for me it's mainly about the music.

And being a digital music fan, there's not a lot of software out there that works well at a distance with a remote like the Media Center, can network through the whole house and can scale with commodity hardware. If you know of something that does all that Media Center does better than Media Center I'm all ears (I've not seen anything in the 4 years I've followed it closely) because I have many of the same qualms that you do.

I forgot to address something else:

You mentioned not liking "checking info on the 'net" but in the case of a DVR solution I think that's the single best thing about Media Center. I can't imagine not liking that the TV guide is downloaded automatically and all your files automatically named.

I now live in a small country that is not supported by Media Center's online information like it was in the US and can't imagine someone not actually liking this part.

It's enough of a pain that I may end up writing software to take the listings off of TV Guide's site (they actually cover the cable company in this country that I use) and format it to Media Center's input format. But since I don't really watch TV much it's only a bit of a nuisance when my girlfriend asks me to schedule recordings on the Media Center I setup for her (and which she, a non-tech, is thoroughly impressed with and learned how to use easily despite it being in a language she doesn't speak well).

Thing is, if you really don't like Media Center you can still use it to record the TV and use another program to play it. There are endless possibilities when you are using commodity hardware and can network over standard protocols and use somewhat accessible formats.

Anywho, once again, just devil's advocate. I'm still looking for a better solution.

Great stuff Robert Gentel,

It sounds like a dedicated PC could do a lot! Your points all make sense, you wrote them well and I learned some cool stuff I can put to good use!

Holiday Cheers,

Chum