DVD recorders - Help

My mom decided that she wants to get my dad a DVD recorder so of course I got a call. I don’t really know that much about them. Will they need a hard drive? I think they want it to record TV shows.

I bought one for my dad a few years ago. He’s crazy about it. It was expensive back then ($400) but I think you can get them for under 2 bills these days. He has a Panasonic and is very happy with it. I don’t think you can erase them once they’re recorded, though. That may have changed over the years.

I have looked into them, but don’t own one as my computer is hooked up to my TV and has the same functions. They come with or without hard drives. I would consider the hard drive essential. The problem is DVDs don’t hold a lot of shows. Maybe just 2 - 4 hours at regular quality. So you will be fumbling with dozens of DVDs, just like we used to with cassettes. A hard drive means you can easily record and delete a collection shows you just want to watch once, and permanently store good programs on the DVDs.

You can get them for around $100 now. I’ve owned three, one the software was really bad and kept doing stupid stuff like turing on and off for no reason. The second got fried by lightning, and the third I still have. They make them so you can use rewritable disks, that’s all I use, I keep one disk in the player and that’s it, though they will start to not work as well after a few months.

I don’t have a HD on mine, though it would be nice I guess, I don’t record enough to notice the difference.

The big downside I have noticed is that they take a while to load up, 30 seconds or more so you have to have it ready if you want to record now. Disks can also be a bit expensive, but I’ve only gone through 3-4 in the last three years. Basically it’s just like a VCR, but with a lot more options which can make them a bit hard to use. I do like mine, but I’d rather have something that I can record in HD.

Do they just want to record TV shows so they can watch them on their own time? Like TiVo? A DVR might be better. Even better is DVR from your cable company.

Unless they’re into video archiving, it seems like overkill to have a DVD recorder just to copy TV shows.

But the DVR is $18 a month a recorder is like $100 with hard drive is like $225

I have purchased four in the past 14 months.

First one (Panasonic) died at 30 days. Just completely died. Dead. No response at all.

I traded it back in for another of the same model.

Guess what? Died at 30 days. Just as completely dead as the prior one.

Took it back and thought, “Maybe I should try a different one.”

Traded it in for a Magnavox. Worked four months without a hitch.

Then, it created a corrupt disk. I figured, “Well, maybe the disk was bad to begin with.” Then, it started intermittently creating bad disks. By December, every disk was corrupt. (That is, it would record, but when I tried to play it back, I would receive an error message.) Also during this time of bad disks, I heard strange sounds coming from the DVD drive that it had not previously made when the disks were playable.

Took it back. However, I wasn’t able to just trade this one in. I’d had it long enough (8 months) that it would have to go to their repair shop. I’d be without it for almost a month.

I decided to pick up another one (a Samsung). Now I have two, so when one craps out now, I’ll have a backup while the other one is being repaired.

True, but do DVD recorders even operate like a VCR. You know, set the clock, program what time and what channel you want to record.
Sounds like a pain-in-the-ass compared to the ease of use of a DVR or TIVO unit.

Yeah, but they’ll use a DVR and the DVD recorder will sit around because it’s a pain in the ass.

I was shopping for a DVD recorder a while ago and ended up getting Tivo instead. I now dwell in Tivo heaven.

I agree completely with this.

But if they really want a DVD recorder, I did some research and bought a Panasonic DM-ES25. It was the best reviewed and best featured unit, and I paid less than $200. It doesn’t have a hard disk, but there’s a similar unit that does.

My research suggested that there are a lot of bad and unreliable machines out there, as Earl and others have testified. So far (about three months) the Panasonic is doing fine.

Wow. The HD DVR from my cable company is only $5 a month.

I don’t think we have Tivo available here, so I am looking into a DVD recorder, too. We have an embarrassment of riches of tv shows we actually want to watch these days; we have two VCRs set now, and it is getting to be a pain in the ass to remember to set them all the time and stuff. I think we will be getting one with a hard drive; I don’t want to fuss with disks at all if I can help it.

Tivo is available in Canada now. I just found out about that a couple of weeks ago. You can’t buy it in a bricks and mortar store yet, but you can get it from an importer. I got mine from pvrcanada.com; I think there are some others also. Try googling.

I’ve had a DVD recorder with a hard drive for a year and a half now and I like it. I record shows to the hard drive just as I would with a VCR. Some shows I watch and delete and others I copy to DVDs. When doing that I can edit out commercials, half time of sporting events, etc before I copy the show to disk. Depending on the quality setting I can get 1, 2, 3, 4 or 6 hours of viewing on one disk.

The thing to remember about DVD recorders as far as I know after reading up about them is that almost are all of them are quirky. Most seem to have something about them that make you wonder why it was designed or acts that way.

That’s been my experience with my brain damaged Goodmans. It has been useless for recording TV because

1 - The clock runs slow so it never has the right time. So timed recordings are guesswork.
2 - It locks up and needs rebooting (unplugging) at random.
3 - This is what really makes it useless for recording shows, after recording for half an hour or so the audio starts lagging the picture making watching anything involving speech painfull.
4 - It will (supposedly) write re-writable DVDs but every time I’ve tried to re-use a disc it died withing two or three writes.

When I feel like replacing my trusty VCR with something digital I’ll get a hard drive based DVD machine for all the reasons Monty brought up.