Apparently I missed the class where they mentioned DVD players/burners for televisions are obsolete.
I have a DVR, and tape lots of shows for friends in Germany. When I get enough shows together, I would slap in a blank DVD disk in my DVD player/recorder - make a copy, send it off and friends could watch in Germany.
Well, the DVD burner/player (television component model) died, so I went to my local Walmart (where I bought this one several years ago) to buy a new one.
“We don’t sell those machines anymore.”
Huh?
So I did a search on Google and, wow - I can’t even find any of those machines!
So now I have a bunch of shows on my DVR that I need to transfer to a DVD disk.
I assume there is a better faster way to do this now, with different technology - but I am clueless. Ya miss one technology class and yer screwed, I tell ya!
What hardware/software do I need to get in order to copy shows I have on my DVR to a a DVD disk? (The cheaper the alternative, the better!)
Amazon…duh, stupid me never thought to look there. A Google search was not all that successful for me. I thought this weekend I would go hit a few of the bigger electronic stores (Fry’s is one locally) and see what they have.
I guess I was just wondering how others copy shows they have on DVR to DVD - it is really convenient and easy to send DVD’s to friends in Germany. Televisions and DVD players now seem able to play all formats, so they can watch shows I send them and I can watch shows they send me.
See if you can find a DVR with a tuner. Then you can skip the DVR to DVD step. I have an older one, but the DVD aren’t too compatible, so I end up running it through DvdShrink and reburning to get something that works on other DVD players.
For stuff I actually want to keep, I reencode it as Divx to save on space. It might save you some postage if your friends can play Divx. My Philips DVD player plays Divx.
I have a DVD recorder that has a built in tuner, so you can set it to record a show at a given time just like an old VCR. You can also set the quality of the recording so you can get 1, 2, 4 or 6 hours of recording on 1 DVD. This might be less useful if you don’t have cable. I don’t know if there is a DVD recorder with an HD tuner.
I have a USB HD tuner that lets me record over the air HD shows on my computer in the Windows Media Center. These files are huge (3.5GB for a half hour show), but I can edit out the commercials in Windows Movie Maker and reencode it at DVD quality to reduce it to 500mb if I want to keep it. This works on Vista, but I seem to recall you can’t do it on Windows 7 for some reason.
OK, I understand your last post. What I don’t understand is what you said before:
“See if you can find a DVR with a tuner. Then you can skip the DVR to DVD step.”
If you have a DVR without a tuner, how does that add an extra step to the process?
Sorry I meant a DVD recorder with a tuner. The original post was about recording on a DVR and then playing it back to copy it to a DVD recorder. This not only introduces an extra step, but will cause some quality degradation, since the usual way to copy from DVR to DVD is a S-Video connection, which is analog.
Are your programs on a satellite DVR, a Cable Company DVR, or an over-the-air DVR (like the DTV Pal DVR)?
Some programs have CPRM built into them with a “Copy Once” flag, which means you can record them to a hard disc and watch them, but the DVD recorder won’t let you record the program that’s already on the hard drive to a DVD disc.