Okay, so this whole thing just started for me again when I watched/recorded a really great Frontline episode this past Tuesday on my Time Warner cable HD-DVR and was left thinking: Wow, it would be nice to burn this thing to a DVD to save for the future/show to friends.

So this brings me back to set-top DVD recorders, a topic I was really excited about at the end of high school/beginning of college back in 2002. I began college in the summer of 2002 and my best friend (who has a rich daddy) had a Philips 985, one of the first set-top DVD recorders on the market. He also had a an old CRT projection "HD Ready" TV with a giant external Samsung HD tuner. I stumbled on a few DVD+Rs of episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise recorded on that old Philips 985 from the component outputs of that Samsung tuner into the component INPUTS of the Philips, popped one of them in my PS3, and the PQ looks DAMN GOOD.

So getting to the point. I come back to AVS (having to create a new username as I long ago forgot the password for my old handle) and after reading for hours many very interesting and informative threads on current DVDRs...it seems that COMPONENT VIDEO INPUT is dead and gone, a thing of the past.

Ive gathered that the only reliable DVD recorders now are the Magnavox Hard Disc recorder and a few Panasonic recorders without tuners. AND NONE OF THEM HAVE COMPONENT VIDEO INPUT. What gives? The Philips 985 was like the second set-top DVD recorder to come out, was built like a tank, and had a feature that seems to be extinct. Sure, the DVD menus it created are laughable, with their blue and green colors and text setup, but the video stands up on my high and mighty PS3.

So here's the situation, my stupid Scientific Atlanta HD-DVR forces a strange letterboxing out of the S-Video output with recorded or live HD content. The component video outs only pass 720p and 1080i anyway, so I guess the lack of component INs on current DVD recorders doesn't much matter anyhow.

I guess its just frustrating that a basically 1st gen product could do something well that current products simply lack.

Anybody with me? And do yall remember those long, sad, stupid debates on the forums on which format would win the "War" DVD-R or DVD+R?

Check out the thread: Cheaper Component to S-Video Converter.

You either have to buy a converter or an older DVDR that has component inputs & use it as a converter.

Very, very few DVD recorders ever had component inputs. There is little reason for having them since no DVD recorder could use any format other then 480i. This limitation, not of the recorders, but of the DVD standard, made component inputs an unnecessary added expense, since composite and S-Video would work with 480i. Apparently it never occurred to the makers that we would like and need such inputs.

Many set-top boxes will not output an anamorphically compressed signal through the composite or S-Video connections, so component is the best option to use, IF it's available. All widescreen video is letterboxed out the "standard" connections.

Thanks for the responses!

Mike99: I read that thread talking about the cheaper component to s-video converter. Someone said that Scientific Atlanta boxes may have the ability to output HD content as SD Anamorphic widescreen via s-video, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I have a Scientific Atlanta 8240HDC HD-DVR, and the s-video output provides a squished letterboxed/pillarboxed image on my Olevia HDTV AND when I try and capture it using my excellent ADS analog to firewire DV bridge. Even zooming and stretching only seems to affect the HDMI and Component outputs. Anyone have any experience with this that doesn't involve buying a video filter??

Church AV Guy: I may have sounded like I was bitching and moaning, and if so I'm sorry. As I admitted earlier in my initial post, even if a current DVD recorder had Component Inputs, it prob wouldn't work with my 8240HDC because it only outputs 720p and 1080i via component anyhow, standards that a DVD recorder wouldn't accept. And not to pick nits, but isn't the limit of the DVD standard 480p not 480i, or are you just saying that no company ever put out a dvd recorder that accept and record a 480p signal?

The thing that makes this so infuriating is that the image of 4:3 SD digital channels is PERFECT over s-video!!! Both on my screen and when I did a test capture with the ADS. This is obviously just the cable companies f-ing with us. I can understand studios wanting to limit the ability of people to make lossless HD copies of films off HBO and the like, but when you take HD video, convert it to analog s-video output, and the convert it BACK to digital with a capture card or DVD recorder that's 2 steps of encoding, and is FAR from lossless. There isn't a market for bootlegs of Frontline and HBO shows made off of DVD recorders, twice re-encoded, with stereo sound when you can find good movies in the Best Buy DVD bargain bin for $5 with studio quality, 5.1 audio, animated menus, and special features.

Okay, so this whole thing just started for me again when I watched/recorded a really great Frontline episode this past Tuesday on my Time Warner cable HD-DVR and was left thinking: Wow, it would be nice to burn this thing to a DVD to save for the future/show to friends.

Well, the good news (maybe) is that with the 2160 HDD, for example, you probably could get an OTA digital signal for that PBS show which would look better than what you're going to be able to record the more convoluted way. QAM via the coax is another possible workaround for good input. Sometimes the simplest solutions are still worth considering. You can dub to DVD but that will be limited to 480, anyway. Another possible route--PBS is putting a lot of their content online, including Frontline (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/), so you can just send your friends a URL and let them watch it from the comfort of their own computer.

That's not to say that you're not absolutely right in asking why the old recording equipment is better made with more convenient higher quality options than the new stuff. Seems to me they're 'dumbing down" every recording method they can.

Svideo.com sells both the $159 AppleTV converter & a less expensive converter, the cheaper Lenkeng LKV7611 $89 which appears to accept many different component resolutions.

http://www.svideo.com/lkv7611.html

You're correct, even if you had a Polaroid DVD w/component inputs you'd have to feed it 480I, nothing more.
AFAIK anything above 480i is not possible to composite or S-video outputs, at least nothing I've used allows anything other than 480i from SD outputs, I think 480p is the starting point for HD, something about not enough bandwith using composite or S-video.

I wasn't saying that you were griping pe say. I don' t know how much you really know about thhese things, but in the six+ years I have been reading this forum, many, many people have said what you said in the OP. Where are the component inputs? Why can my STB only give me letterboxed output of WS material, effectively making my widescreen HDTV into a letter_box/postage_stamped display, with poor resolution?

The truth of this is: The consumers are not the driving force for the features on these consumer electronics machines. The content providers are the driving force, and they saw the audio recording industry lose the technology battle, and they are not about to see the samething happen to them. Even if the audio industry losing to technology is merely an impression they they have, and isn't actually true, they are running paranoid. They fear giving us unimpeeded access to content of any "quality" for fear of losing sales $, so they cripple the machines. The professional pirates stay in business, but people like us are impacted. The result: no even possible high def inputs on these things.

That's not to say that you're not absolutely right in asking why the old recording equipment is better made with more convenient higher quality options than the new stuff. Seems to me they're 'dumbing down" every recording method they can.When people demanded DVD recorders sell for as cheap as possible and considered it unthinkable to spend more than $300, compromises in design, lower quality and greatly reduced feature sets became the norm. And besides, the decision to limit composite and SD outputs on a cable box to 3:4 is the decision of the cable company alone. A $40 CECB will output 9:16 anamorphic widescreen from both composite and S-Video outputs.

Church AV Guy: Oh, I'm know expert by far but I kind of know my stuff. For the first two years of college I shared an apartment with my buddy with the setup mentioned above. We're talking 2002, 2003, and the beginning of 2004. He had a 50"-somthing Philips Rear Projection CRT TV that was "HD ready" with component inputs, but I remember the TV having trouble even reliably taking a 1080i OTA signal from the Samsung ATSC tuner he had...so we just set the output to 480p over the components with HD material and thought that looked incredibly good. I mean we thought progressive scan DVD on that crappy CRT Projo screen was the best thing since sliced bread. And then he got that Philips DVDR-985 in summer of 02...which was like the SECOND ever DVD recorder Philips ever put out, costing nearly a Grand, and we would regularly set the Samsung Tuner to output 480i material and pipe it into the Philips 985 via component, and the it looked pretty damn good, preserving the aspect ratio on HD content. In central Texas HDTV over cable was pretty nonexistent until late 2004, but that Samsung tuner picked up ATSC over the air, basically NBC, CBS, and ABC and VERY RARELY Fox. He'd record sporting events and I'd record Star Trek: Enterprise.

Mike99: Some of those converters look neat, but at $90 we're getting a bit steep for something that I'd use incredibly infrequently. For that price I could 4 and a half Blu-Ray movies, at full quality, so we're talking diminishing returns here. But thanks for the heads up.

I guess I was always incredibly interested in set-top DVDRs, but something else I wanted more would always come along. At one point, I had All of Star Trek: TOS, Star Trek: TNG, and Deep Space Nine recorded on T-160 video tapes at SP, WITH COMMERCIALS PAUSED OUT, close to 400 episodes of TV at 45 mins a pop. I realized that with the cost of a decent set-top DVDR, DVD-R discs, and my time, I could just buy all three series on DVD for less. I ended up buying the Trek season box sets and giving all the tapes to a cousin.

Something in me seems to think that the majority of set-top archiving as we got used to it in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s might be going away. Perhaps the few OTA networks via ATSC tuner and the few clear QAM channels will continue allow some limited DVDR market to continue for awhile, but with everything going to HD and ZERO Blu-Ray recorders on the horizon for the USA, I think we're seeing the end of an era.

And as stupid as it may sound, that kinda makes me sad.

And as stupid as it may sound, that kinda makes me sad.

If that's stupid, we're all stupid around here. :D