Has anyone found a dvd recorder that can properly set to widescreen flag during recorder and will start playing video instead of going to menu when one of it's recorded discs is inserted into another player? I have yet to find such a recorder. Just wondering if anyone else has.

Thanks,
Scott

I think-but not 100% certain, that all recorders allow the option of setting whether playback starts, or whether the menu comes up, when you go to finalize the disc (which makes it playable in other dvd players).

I think-but not 100% certain, that all recorders allow the option of setting whether playback starts, or whether the menu comes up, when you go to finalize the disc (which makes it playable in other dvd players).

Discs made on my Pio 640 require you to use the menu to start play on all DVD players I have tried them on. I think most DVDRs are that way. Perhaps a few, maybe that fancy Tosh that is no longer made, will let you make a disc that plays on insertion.

All Panasonics will but they won't set the widescreen flag. I'm kind of interested in the first part of your question also, I know the older XS Toshibas did and some have said the newer Toshibas do although I'm not 100% sold on that, I'd need a few more conformations and I'm not sure about auto play with any of the Toshibas.

my 2 toshs will allow user to set the widescreen flag to record 16:9.
says nothing i can find about autoplay...just says some discs may start playing on insertion.

From page 122 of the Toshiba RD-XS35 manual:

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y45/p_l/Toshp122-1.jpg

Damn, they sure had advanced features! Like nothing else I've seen, other than a computer.

Mmmm... nice options... I'm jealous! :D

That RD-XS35 manual page does look great. My 2 toshs don't say that anywhere I see but then mine are the DVR670 and 560 and not the XS series. mine do say will do 16:9 but looks like play from a menu or playlist.

Its become a near-comical cliche at this point that the answer to any possible DVD recorder feature request anyone ever comes here with is "yeah, the old discontinued Toshiba XS series did that".:rolleyes:

Its a damn shame sales of premium DVD/HDD machines were so dismal that Toshiba could not continue making their own deluxe gear, and had to outsource their current "ordinary" combo recorders. Then again, the old fancy XS decks were not exactly a barrel of fun for any but the most dedicated hobbyists (I owned one for about two weeks and could not stand the thing, sold it off at a slight profit to another fanatic). Besides being challenging to use, he XS series is notorious for a laundry list of glitches, from lousy sudden-death optical drives to weird burn strategies that can make their DVDs unplayable on other hardware. This varied depending on specific model, some were rather better than others and its hard to keep track. In an ideal world, sales would have been brisk enough to encourage further evolution of the XS idea: by 2009, they might have had a killer machine that was also reliable. Too bad, really: the XS was an amazingly versatile recorder that easily trumped a PC for full basic DVD authoring.:(