Dish DTVPal / Echostar TR40 digital to analog converter - Page 224

Yeah, it's OK to pair with either an old SDTV, or even sometimes a small-ish HD one (but I personally would never use it on an HDTV larger than 26" - you'll get arguments about that on the threads for it, but I'm pretty discriminating myself. I'd probably be more inclined to even try a Pal DVR on a TV larger than that first).

Don't wait for a DVD recorder that will also do HD from it's tuner, though, if that's what you're saying. You'll never see that. The non-hard drive, Panasonic EZ-28 has very, very good, downscaled HD PQ from it's tuner, but that's about as good as you'll get, and it'll never be true HD.

Heh, I doubt I will get anything bigger than 20". Maybe 21" since my room and desk are tiny. Also, anything taller would prevent me to open and close my windows swinging shudder doors. Anyways, we'll deal with the replacements later on whenever that is. No point of looking now since technology is changing. Oh and no 3DTVs! My eyes can't see 3D effects. :P

I have a 19", cheapo-cheapo, 720p Dynex LCD in my bedroom (which actually outperforms it's price point by a mile), and I honestly can't even tell the difference when it switches between HD and SD most of the time - it's that sharp.

Of course, that's from it's internal, ATSC tuner. But I have hooked up my older, SD HDD/DVD recorders to it in the past, and they still look very good on it, too.

As far as 3D, I have absolutely zero interest in it, too. It looks like moving, one-dimensional, cardboard cut-outs to me (animation looks OK enough, I guess - but I'd mainly be interested in it for sports, with live human beings moving around in it). Just doesn't look natural enough - not to mention the goofy, large, heavy, uncomfortable glasses.

Cool. By then, prices will be cheaper and more stable I hope! For now, I will stick with my old stuff (just wished my 13 months old converter box was stable).

If you could've gotten by with just recording from a couple of OTA channels unattended (and weren't going to be away from home that long), it would've been better to have just gotten a couple of Zenith CECB's, daisy-chained them together through RF, and set recordings from them through separate line inputs.

That was the problem - that the only couple of boxes with timers weren't all that great with reliability.

Yeah, I noticed my parents' Zeinth converter boxes were more reliable but then they didn't have schedulers and complexities. I do have a lot of OTA channels and schedules. I cannot even get all TV shows on my list. I have to reserve one to do daily fiveh ours power on to avoid the hang/freeze so I only have four slots for scheduling my TV shows. I usually schedule the ones I know I am not at home.

Too bad you couldn't afford TiVo then. You wouldn't really have to worry about that. I think with the Maggie you can schedule quite a lot of recordings (30-something, maybe?).

30? Wow. No wonder it's so expensive.

Funny, my current, old VCR can do six recordings! Stupid DTV Pal with their bugs and having me to sacrificing a schedule slot. All of my TV shows are weekly based so it's not like I can use that one slot to power on for five hours daily. At least FOX Sunday nights are from 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM (don't watch Cleveland Show though -- but I am OK to record it to keep it up nonstop).

No, I was talking about the Magnavox when I said that - that's relatively inexpensive, especially as far as HDD/DVD recorders go. You can get them refurbished from J&R World for under $200.00.

I don't know what the exact limit is offhand on the TiVo - I've never scheduled more than a few things at a time on mine. I actually schedule more recordings on my SD Panasonic EH75V than I do on my TiVo HD (there's one, particular SD channel on Dish that I record a lot of programming from using the Panny. I've got about 3 recordings per day set for that channel with it right now. I currently don't even have anything set to record "regularly" on the TiVo).

Just like with the Pal, you can upgrade the hard drives on both the TiVo and the Magnavox.

Oh. I will look into it deeper when I need to replace my current DTV Pal and/or VCR.

Stupid DTV Pal hung again when it was supposed to turn on tonight and when I manually turned it on. Same exact problem last Monday night. I think I am going to tell it to reset to defaults and set it up again from scratch. ANNOYING!

For event timers there's also the TACB-2009 which almost went completely unnoticed.

That's right, there are (still?) a couple of TACB boxes but with poor marketing, few here knew anything about them until ironically the coupons just expired. Feature-rich box(s) but little review and even less reliability feedback on yonder AVS thread. Looks great on paper and per the one or two who posted their results.

Would a TVGOS-featured box do the trick? I recall Artec makes one and I believe are still for sale on Meritline.com or somesuch site. I liked what I saw inside those Artecs from a design&mfging standpoint. Zenith/Insignia clones too.

Shhhh! I was hoping phildaant might rush out and buy one and post even more details.

Unless phildaant has a TVGOS VCR I don't think a TVGOS converter box will help. But a month with a HDD/DVD recorder and that VCR will be a doorstop.

Well was more of a general/for me question. VCRs are almost free in the used universe.

Got a good place to find them?

I see a lot of people selling/getting rid of VCRs for cheap/free. Check garage sales as good sources.

As for TVGOS. I don't think so? When did TVGOS start? I have had my Toshiba W-627 VCR like a decade old? VCR's manual, in http://www.fixya.com/support/p202388...cr/manual-5900 , showed nothing when I search "TVGOS" and "guide" keywords separately.

Amazingly, my VCR still works so far. I wonder how much longer. The last VCR I had before this one broke with its VHS tape getting stuck (didn't care for it), so I bought this one back when TiVo was new during dotcom days. Funny how it is still expensive and still wants subscription. MEH!

Some confusion on my part, as phil questioned I don't think VCRs had TVGOS capability. Just TVs and other recorder types.

But as far as looking for used goodies I use Craigslist for local (pick-up) areas and Ebay for anything I'm willing to pay to ship.

Ebay has a good seach engine. Did you know that great deals can be found by typing in common misspellings?

Craigslist search is barebones. If you type in too much info you won't find anything, too little and you're looking through ads for hours. Also, I've learned to search in the "all for sale / wanted" category to avoid having to search in several different categories (some folks put stuff in the darndest categories!). I sent them a request to ad highlighting for search words but no response (it's a pain when an ad has a list of 100 different items, esp in a big jumbled pgh). Of course there's always the "free stuff" category but the good stuff goes fast.

There were some VCR's that had it, only it was called "Guide Plus+" back then.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Gemsta......-a055407441

(Note the second sentence of the 12th paragraph.)

Interesting as someone on these threads said it never happened and there's no mention on this Wiki article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guide_Plus

But I see one specific model (Sony SLV-M20HF) mentioned otherwise it's all TVs. So I'm not sure if they're talking about exactly the same thing in that sentence (maybe an older version of EPG?). Anyhow, maybe a needle in a haystack but you've proven it does exist in some VCRs. Thanks!

I have a Sony VCR Plus+ VCR. I wish I had an easy way to decode&recode the timeslot info with the channel set to L1.

Yeah, I saw the Wiki article first, and I also noticed that they didn't mention them, so I continued to look for something that did mention it, because I was absolutely positive that there were some VCRs with it.

It was an older version of TVGOS, and was specifically called "Guide Plus+ Gold/Silver" in the VCR. It wasn't put into a lot of them like "VCR Plus+" was (which I think even had their own versions of "Gold" and "Silver") - just some higher end models of brands like Sony, Panasonic and RCA, back at the tail end of when "good" VCR's were still being manufactured.

Maybe I can dredge up some specs of the models online. I used to have Crutchfield catalogs that listed the Sony's and Panasonic's, but they're long gone now. The Kmart here carried one of the RCA's, and I used to look at it all the time. I really wanted one of the models, but I was dirt poor back then and the better brands that I preferred cost upwards of $300.00 (the Crutchfield prices were retail).

Well I'm glad you had the conviction to prove it as I had given up. Now when I get a chance I'll do some searches on "Guide Plus+ VCR" and I bet some old models will show up. I had previously searched using "TVGOS VCR" and that was probably my downfall. Ironically I threw out an old Crutchfield catalog collecting dust not that long ago.

At least we know of one Sony. I'm not crazy about that Thomson Consumer Electronics (RCA, GE, ?) crud after having several problems right after warranty expired on an RCA Home Theater TV and a GE TV. Lots of soldering problems way back when. The GE is still kicking though after resoldering the entire tuner section (tuner is still flaky though but with the CECBs I don't have to use the tuner anymore except for as a VCR CH 3 quick-monitor). I miss the old 'RCA' RCAs, still have an old working knob style in a spare room, I think a 1983 model.

I love my Sony VCR. Got it from my neighbor who's always buying new stuff. He said it worked fine but it wouldn't do SP at all and EP was flaky so I set it aside for a year until my Hitachi started getting worn down. Turned out to be a rivet washer had slid down a post holding a tape tensioner assembly to the chassis - I'm guessing he dropped the VCR after he disconnected it.

I thought the DTVpal "plus" model fixed all those bugs? Or are they still present?

My old Digital-VHS VCR had somewhere around 50 slots. And it included a DTV tuner built-in but not very sensitive. It's a shame JVC stopped making D-VHS because it was more capable than any of the DVD Recorders. Oh well.

Floydage 6712:
I have a Toshiba VHS that has "VCRplus+ w/cable channel changer" on the front panel and wants to know what the Guide channel is in setup. Not sure what that means...
Model M-683
There are more out there if you are looking for them.
tom

I've never used VCR Plus+ because it's obsolete in my Sony VCR with only an analog tuner (i.e. the Plus code would tune it to an analog channel). I doubt it ever came with a digital tuner in a VCR. Does your Toshiba have a digital tuner?
Now the "cable channel changer" part of it may be useful if it can be set to channel L1, L2, 3, or 4 for the Plus code timeslots (my Sony doesn't have that function so I don't know).

We are looking for something called Guide Plus+ with VCRs, an older version of TVGOS.

Nope, analog only. Built like a tank, but obsolete as they say.
tom

I've been searching for well over an hour, and I haven't had any luck at all. Now I'm beginning to think I'm nuts, but I'm still pretty sure I wasn't dreaming. Whatever models there were weren't out long. Maybe it actually was just the one Sony model, and possibly also the RCA one I seem to remember.

I did find another, similar article which mentions VCR's coming out with it, but no specific models (it does mention some brand names, but not the types of devices from each):

http://www.allbusiness.com/company-a...7244366-1.html

(The article is geared towards Canada, but later into the article it mentions the US and North American market.)

I'll keep an eye out for any mentions of any of them, but I've about had it searching for now. At least we have evidence of one Sony model. I'm guessing that whatever was out with it, there were probably only a few handfuls of people that actually ever owned them, and not much information online. Being VCR's, they could be long since junked and forgotten by now. Especially a crappy RCA, if there was one (I was hoping to at least come across some old forum post somewhere where someone talked about one, but I could only find TV-related ones).

I've definitely seen the Sony VCR w/TVGOS(or Guide+). It was at a pawn shop not too long ago and had the IR blaster port but no IR blaster was to be seen.
It would make sense that RCA/Thompson would have had a VCR with TVGOS, they made several mid level TVs with TVGOS. I agree about the better RCAs, I have a '82 RCA VCR(which was actually made by Matsushita(Panasonic)) and it was built like a tank. The Thompson RCAs seem like any other Chinese product. Of course I think you'd have to go way back to find a RCA RCA product.
I had a 12" RCA built B&W TV years ago(50s model) that was build like a tank. Of course almost everything back then was built like a tank

It's probably the CBS channel. Or it could be PBS. However since analog is dead there's no longer anything for the VCR to "see" on either of those channels.

I've been too swamped to look but it could be the archive info is too old to be found on the ol' 'net.

My TVs showed Thomson as US/Canadian (has both on each side of the sticker). Assembled in Bloomington, Indiana but I think the guts were from Mexico. Seems I recall something about Thomson being French though (?).