OK, let me preface by saying that I have not really kept up with the whole “household consumer electronics” trend. My trusty old DVD player was a combination DVD/VCR. No frills. No recording. No nothin’.
But now the old girl is dead, and I’m at a loss. In my brief research, there seems to have been a bewildering array of home entertainment technologies that have been born in the last few years…most of which I’m utterly ignorant of.
I have no idea about DVR, Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, progressive scan, or even TiVo, really. Do they make DVD players/recorders/whatever with onboard disc drives now? Is the VCR utterly and completely dead now? Is TiVo a brand of hardware, a service to be subscribed to, or what? Both? Neither?
I’m so confused. Somebody help. Any recommendations or technical advice would be much appreciated.
It’s too early to buy Blue Ray or HD DVD players as the format war is still to occur. The Tivo thing is great if you watch lots of broadcast tv from a cable carrier as it records whatever you want whenever it’s on and allows you to watch whenever you like.
DVD players are dirt cheap, and will do fine for nearly all usage. DVD recorders are OK if you used the VHS you had before to record broadcast TV but TiVo seems much better option for that. If you have lots of VHS tapes you still want to be able to watch I’d suggest buying separate DVD and VHS player if you can since if one fails the other can be relied on. Twin VHS and DVD players are available, but I’m not sure you save much money buying one.
One important note, if your system is old, then what kind of connections do you have on the back of your TV. There may not be enough ports for connecting multiple sources to your tv, and though source switchers are available, they are either manual operated or can be fairly pricey (ie switcher costs $100 whilst the dvd player was only $35 ).
My system has adequate connections available. I actually run everything through a multi-component receiver.
Do they make, say, a combination TiVo/DVD player? We do occasionally record shows to watch later (although we don’t really keep a backlog of VHS tapes.) It seems like some sort of combination of the two functions would serve our needs best. Any suggestions?
Also, what about these “home theatres in a box” I keep seeing? Are they worth anything? My multi-component receiver is old and bulky, and I’ve considered replacing the whole shebang with one unit that has (hopefully) a receiver, a DVD player (along with whatever recording functions), and routing capabilities. The speakers would just be a bonus (plus, it would allow me to put a surround sound system in our living room.)
TiVo is brand of hard-drive video recorders, and a subscription service for those recorders. You get on-screen program listing, “season passes” (automatically records every episode of a given series, or every movie by a given actor, etc), etc. There is a monthly fee. There are also combo units with DVD player or recorder functions, made by other companies. (It still uses the TiVo firmware for the hard-drive video recorder function, and connects to the TiVo service.)
I actually have a Toshiba TiVo + DVD player combo unit, but I still don’t see much point in it. The two functionalities are completely separate. And it’s not a very good DVD player - it takes forever to load the disk, for example. A TiVo + DVD recorder combo makes more sense - I believe they allow you to record to the hard drive and later transfer it to a DVD.
A “home theatre in a box” can be a simple 5.1-channel surround speaker system, or it may include a DVD player. They can be decent. You get what you pay for.
Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are two competing and non-mutually-compatible formats for what both camps are touting as the “Next Generation DVD”. Unless you have money to burn, sit that one out for a few years. Some are saying no one even feels right now that they NEED a next generation DVD, so these boxes and the movies formatted for them are not selling well yet. Wait for the dust to settle.
As far as “progressive scan” is concerned, it’s an alternate way for information to be stored/read off of a DVD, and you only need to be concerned about it if a new box you get isn’t compatible with the rest of your system in some way, which a quick perusal of your manuals should tell you. If you don’t have your manuals, almost all electronic companies have .pdfs of their manuals on their websites now.
DVR is Digital Video Recording, and it rocks. You watch TV through it, like when you hook up your VCR to record. Instead of using tape, it records to a hard drive, and offers all the random access advantages of disk over tape that you can imagine. Anyway, since you are watching the recording directly from the hard drive, you can pause a TV show while you’re watching it, or choose to record it for watching later. The most popular version of this by far is TiVo, but there are others. TiVo, once you buy the box, let’s you subscribe to their service if you like, which includes information about what’s coming on many days in advance. You pick a bevy of programs in advance and TiVo records them for you when they come up. TiVo can also record other programs it thinks you will like based on what you’re recorded in the past.
My DirecTV satellite receiver has built-in DVR capability and service by TiVo, and I love it. I can’t hack it the way you can with other TiVo boxes, but it does have two tuners, so I can watch one channel and record another, or record two channels and watch something I’ve saved previously. Heaven. I can’t go back.
And the VCR is maybe not 100% absolutely dead, but it has definitely attained “quaint” status, like my turntable and large record collection.
There are hard drive based DVD recorders. I think they all have Tv-Guide functionality. Information comes from the air instead of the phone line. It is free (there are boxes for ads but I’ve never seen one), but has no where near the functionality of TiVo. (The Piuoneer unit, which I own, is know for dropping info as well)
I’ve burned 2 DVDs so far, mostly I use it as a hard drive recorder (record a show-watch it-delete) or as a DVD player. (I have it in progressive mode w/ the component output to my projector) (If I record TV shows, I just watch them on the TV with S-Video)
I’m not a big fan of convergence, as I’d rather have 5 devices that do one thing well than one device that does 5 things poorly. So I would probably buy just a DVD player. I’m not sure what particular one, since I am not really in the market, but it would definitely be a progressive scan. A progressive DVD player will have a somewhat better picture and will do better if you ever go to HDTV. The DVD picture, of course, won’t be HD, but it’ll be pretty good.