I have the chane to buy a Panasonic RV-30 at Sears (Sears Card, hehehe)for $199, and, I was just wondering if it’s a good deal and if it’s a good player. I’d realy appriciate it.
Also, what will I need to hook it up to my TV, it only has that one place on the back of it to hook a coex cable into. Can I run the DVD player through my VCR? Or do I have to go straight to my TV using an RF Adapter therefore having the DVD player and my VCR hooked up at the same time? Just let me know what you can.
I could be wrong (it’s been known to happen) but I think pumping the DVD player’s audio and video output into the VCR and using the VCR’s RF (channel 3/4 output) to drive the cable/RF input of the TV should work fine. You may run into a macrovision interference issue if you try to record a DVD onto a tape but just for DVD playback the VCR should work fine.
The problem is cheaply designed VCR’s. Macrovision triggers the Automatic Gain Control on the VCR to do it’s magic. In theory, the VCR has no need to run the signal through the AGC if you’re not recording. In reality, it’s easier and cheaper to make a design that uses the same circuitry (including AGC) whether you’re recording or not.
So yeah, it probably won’t work to run it through your VCR. But it’s worth a try.
My mom gave me a DVD player for Xmas, and I knew nothing about Macrovision or Automatic Gain Control, so I ran the output from the DVD player through my old VCR and it didn’t work. It didn’t work in a very distinctive way, though, where the picture quality would get really bad for a few seconds, then perfect for a few seconds, and go back and forth like that. So I took the DVD player back and got another kind, and had the same problem when I hooked it up. So I decided the problem was in my VCR and bought a new one, and now the picture quality is fine all the time. I thought it was just some problem with my old VCR, until the other night when I tried to copy a tape and got the same good-bad-good-bad quality thing. I think this all makes sense in light of what SmackFu said, and my new VCR only uses AGC when it’s recording. So one way to solve the problem is to get the right kind of VCR. Mine’s a Philips.
When I was trying to test my old VCR, my friend brought over an old, severely battered VCR she paid $10 for at a garage sale and the DVD player worked great with it.
Um… I don’t really think that’s going to do the trick. If the TV is RF input only, and using a VCR is possibly out due to macrovision interference, you need an RF modulator to turn the line input signal into an RF signal that the TV can accept. A “splitter” doesn’t do this.
A better use of money in general would be to get a better TV set. A TV that doesn’t have a audio/video line input is likely to be so old or so cheap that the clarity benefits of DVD will be lost.
I got the Panasonic RV-30 for Christmas, and it’s been working great so far. We’ve even played rental disks in it with no problems. It also plays the audio CD-R’s we’ve made. We paid $199 for it, and I think it was worth it.
I have no idea how you’d hook it up to an older TV, though. Sorry :(.
