Where have all the DVD recorders gone? - Page 3

I don't understand it when people say they expect the price on these products to skyrocket on ebay. Why would they?

People are buying these products, in good part, for their DVR functionality. At $300, these DVD recorders with "DVR lite" functionality are a good value -- at least until Dish Network irons out the kinks on its DTVPal DVR. But the Philips and Magnavox are not competitive as DVRs at a significantly higher price. The DVR functionality is inferior to products like the TivoHD ($600 with no fees), so once the value proposition is gone, there isn't a reason to buy one unless you need to make DVDs on a regular basis.

Refer to my post above for a comparison of the $300 Philips to a $600 TiVo (no fees).

Kelson, The post I linked was a one-post thread. Here is the other thread you mentioned:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1074330

I got lost very quickly on that thread. Confession, I had trouble figuring out my Panasonic all by its lonesome. Someone on the Yahoo users group helped me figure out editing and disk burning. I do not find software/firmware intuitive and I have no patience for deciphering them. That was a major reason I did not buy the Philips sooner. I did not want to learn a new game. I hoped Panasonic would drop a digital tuner into an update of the EH75. I also wanted a VCR in the same box.

I don't want to hijack this thread. Can someone point me toward a thread (if one exists) that explains why the heck DVRs are becoming extinct?

I can't answer all of your questions but I can tell you that using a good ATSC tuner connected to a recorder using S-Video gives very good results. Better than my other recorder with built in ATSC tuner.

I'd rather throw it up on Craigslist or sell it on the AVS classifieds (you'll sell it in a day here, probably.) Don't let some reseller sucker people into an outrageous markup.


Same for the Moxi box. A little pricier ($800 to Tivo's $600) but an alternative. No fees there (fees aren't even an option. They only sell the box itself.)

The prices won't come down unless they sell enough to take advantage of economies of scale (which requires an investment of at least a few years or more), but the convenience of cable DVRs and billing monthly fees as part of a cable bill makes for stiff competition in the feeless market.

If you mean DVD recorders, there are plenty of threads, but the explanations range from conspiracy against copying (which I guess has some merit, but I doubt is the sole reason) to the fact that Americans aren't really DVD archivers but time shifters, and the cable DVRs and TiVo rule the roost in that regard (which I think is more plausible because you can see the market.)

DVD recorders aren't quite as simple as VCRs were, and the hard drive models have a bit of a learning curve that rewards those who use them for archiving, but are a bit beyond what the average consumer is willing to put up with. So they plunk down $15 a month for a box that has simple functionality and then they just delete the program once they watched it. If they want to keep it, they can get it off Amazon. Because recording DVDs is a drag, man (no joke, someone once told me that.)

Most material shown on TV and cable networks is viewed once and then discarded. DVRs are fine for use in a throw-away society where little is of enduring value.

My Philips and Magnavox HDD/DVD recorders and Panasonic DVD recorders are ideal for recording/archiving material. I have five HDD/DVD recorders or DVD recorders dedicated exclusively to the "uncut and commercial free" Turner Classic Movies. My favorite material ranges from early talkies through the film noir era (from 1928 to around 1957).

My DVD index now includes more than 22,300 home-recorded titles, more than 5,200 of which home-recorded videotaped titles were recorded over a twenty year period mainly from The Nostalgia Channel, (pre-2000) AMC, and TCM. Those (selected) home-recorded videotaped titles were transferred to DVD in a ten month long project concluded in September 2007. During that project I utilized four and sometimes as many as seven Panasonic DMR-ES30V and DMR-ES35V models, most of which were recording sixteen to eighteen hours a day, six days a week.

A DVR is of little use to the few of us that record titles worth saving.

How did those units hold up by the end of it?

I meant DVD-Recorder--those that can burn to a DVD. I keep forgetting about the Tivos and such that are just DVRs. Do I have the terminology correct now?

I don't necessarily agree that Americans don't archive. But if they don' archive, DVD-Recorders with a hard drive are essentially no-brainers for time shifting. Easy to use and easy to delete programs. Yes there is a learning curve (I found out the hard way) to edit and archive but time shifting is even easier than with a VCR. And if a hard disk is used there is no worry about tape space.

Some Americans archive, sure. Some Americans still use laserdiscs.

But the majority, once they've watched something, they don't need to see it again (or if they do, they buy the commercial DVD.) Unfortunately, with today's electronic industry in the American market, it has to mass sell or the companies don't see them as something to keep around.

DVD Recorders with hard drives, once you get going with them, certainly are easy, but DVD recorders in general don't have the "pop them in and go" use that VCRs had. The discs often had formating and finalizing, and rewritable discs didn't come on the market right away, whereas tapes were recordable from the get-go. Plus, you had DVD-R, DVD+R (which were recordable once), DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM, all adding to the confusion that recorders were these complicated machines. Then TiVo came along with its bonehead simple interface and that was it. Americans fell in love with DVRs because they did exactly what they wanted. Recorders fell by the wayside.

Contrast that with Japan, where the culture does have an archiving mentality. DVD (and I think Blu-Ray) recorders are still going strong.

IMO it's a shame, because there are things I do like to save, like movies shown on the Hallmark channel that just don't seem to get released to DVD for ages, or their many different mystery series. I record them to the DVR, then onto DVD. I've still got 2 working Panny DVD recorders, thankfully, plus an older Panny that I think still works...after they die though, I'll sorely miss the ability to be able to save stuff to DVD if I choose to.

just my 2 cents worth...

DGK

Many on this forum are doing exactly what you are, except they are doing it another way, to put thousands of titles available at the touch of their remote.

Rather than burning to DVD, you can simply download / transfer all your recordings from the DVR (either a TiVo or a PC DVR) to a network drive anywhere in your home. Rather than finding your movies by looking through shelves and shelves of DVDs, you can simply pick the movie from the list on a media player connected to every TV in your home.

Archiving your programs this way, rather than on DVD, ensures that you get the full A/V quality of the original recording, including high-definition video with Dolby Digital 5.1 sound. This also eliminates concerns over storage space and misplaced titles. You can find and play any title in seconds, rather than minutes, without having to swap disks.

If you've read the links in my signature, you know that there are free programs to automate commercial removal. These programs can process recordings -- as they download -- to delete the detected commercials, or they can simply create text files which other media players use to skip commercials in the unmodified recording.

This is a speculation based on what happened to the Panasonic and Pioneer DVD recorders at the end of their runs. By Jan '07 the Panasonic EH55/75 were essentially off the market. ATSC tuners would be required in all new tunered models as of 3/07. No new HDD-DVDR's had been announced, Panasonic said they weren't making them for the US any more and Pioneer pulled the plug altogether. And the reigning TiVo was the very expensive S3, the TiVo HD had not been released yet, so no one was interested in TiVo. The people here were scrambling on the internet looking for HDD-DVDR sellers -- pretty much the same as you have recently seen with the Philips and Magnavox units.

As a result, the Panasonics started having their prices jacked up from independent sellers and dealers on ebay. People were trying to get $1000 for EH-55's. So we have the same situation now, the Philips and Magnavox are at the ends of their run, no new models are forthcoming and people are scrambling -- so the speculation is that the prices will get jacked up on ebay. And they probably will because the number available will be few and will be covered by the number of people who want a unit with builtin DVD burner.

What outputs does TiVo have for transfer to an external drive?

The TiVo HD has networking functionality which sets it apart from all other DVR's and DVD recorders. Using their free software or other 3rd party developed tools you can transfer recorded programs back and forth between your networked PC and a TiVo. I have an external 1TB HDD on my PC dedicated to the TiVo. In addition to TiVo originated recordings I have a bunch of DVD movies I own ripped and loaded to the PC drive so I can dial them up on the TiVo any time I want. I'm currently working my way through Battlestar Galactica via the TiVo. I'm also working my way through the new Dr. Who seasons, but since Netflix allows me to stream that and the TiVo HD is NetFlix enabled, that is also available to me on-demand without any work on my part.

I burned relatively little when I was using my DVD recorder, but when I did I never editied on the Panasonic and always used the RAM disk to transfer the recording to my PC for editing and authoring. With the TiVo, I do the transfer via ethernet. The recordings are HD/5.1 and my software can transcode to SD for standard DVD-Video -- but keeping the 5.1 audio. No stand-alone DVD recorder does 5.1 audio.

If you mean to something like an external, standalone DVD recorder, I'd imagine the same as anything else - s-video or composite.

Component, too, if you have one of those rare, older models that'll accept that input.

To a computer, though, the actual owners here can answer that.

All these 2005 and 2006 model year Panasonics were fully functional at last use, but have been set aside as standby machines that may be returned to regular use in a matter of minutes. Five of these fully functional Panasonics average around 3,000 recording hours per machine; a sixth fully functional Panasonic has more than 4,300 recording hours.

The 2005 model DMR-ES30V with more than 4,300 recording hours had the DVD Drive replaced under warranty after eleven months of heavy use prior to its utilization in the dubbing project. The Panasonic DVD Drive rubber hubs (sitting atop the drive spindle) are cleaned at regular service/rotation intervals. I rebuilt the VHS mechanism in one DMR-ES35V and swapped in a front panel mini-switch in another DMR-ES35V and a front panel circuit board in another DMR-ES35V. In order to avoid "down time" during the dubbing project I didn't resort to warranty service for those models still covered by the Panasonic warranty. The replacement parts came from two DMR-ES35V "as-is" parts machines purchased as the dubbing project progressed. None of the dubbing project Panasonics has required a power supply electrolytic capacitor replacement.

Counting just the Panasonics, there are two 2006 models, one 2008 model and four 2007 models in current use. Our daughter has two 2005 DMR-ES30V models of her own in current use. That totals eighteen functional Panasonic DVD recorders and three non-functional Panasonic parts machines in our household.

I use Taurgus albums each holding 320 DVDs. The entire archive currently occupies about the same shelf space as our print edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica. Consulting the DVD Index (in the MS Works database format), locating the disc, inserting that disc into a DVD player and viewing the specific title may take less than one minute.

Commercials? What Commercials?

That's an impressive collection, but cannot fathom how much time you spent on something that a DVR and computer would have done automatically.

Every week, my DVR and PC continues to add new titles to my collection without me having to do anything.

A quick calculation comes up with perhaps 35,000 hours of video in my home-recorded DVD archive. I imagine that would take a pretty large network drive, eh?

An archive of 35,000 hours @ 2.5Mbps ABR (the average bitrate of digital channels on cable) would translate to roughly 39,375,000 MB, or 37.5 TB.

To store that much video, you would need a drive array with 25 1.5TB drives, a cost of about $3000 just for the bare drives. To provide redundant storage with RAID (to prevent loss of recordings in the event of drive failure), you'd probably need 1.5x that number.

I was at Best Buy a few weeks back and saw 400 DVD carousal DVD player, I think Diga could use that one, if he has the any space left from all the recorders that he has ;-)

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produc..._400_Disc.html

He didn't say he watches all of them - just records them.

I think I'll keep my current "paid for" set ups as seen in these photos I just snapped in my home office and bedroom. These are my main "current use" machines. There are three unseen TVs in the home office and two unseen TVs and a Sony DVD player in the bedroom. Goodness, I need to do some dusting in my bedroom.

Standby machines are back in their original boxes in a closet.

Some people think buying DVDs by the 100 spindle are too many. From photo #2 I see you buy your Ty's by the box full

for some others of us, that's a very true statement.

35,000 hours of video, racks of recorders, cases of blank DVD's. I just have to ask the question -- why???

Some people collect stamps, some collect butterflies, DigaDo collects stuff on DVD.

I may watch whatever I please, whenever I please.

I do the same thing, archive my favorites to dvd. I don't always ever watch em again but I've got em
I am doing a LOT of my stuff with the HDTV capture card in my pc, then I burn em on regular DVD in HD-DVD format for full hd 1080i goodness. Doing the same idea to BD format style take twice as long and more disk space the few times I tried it so sticking with HD-DVD for now. One of the best reason I got one of the cheap A2 players when they blew em out.
My friend does do the media center route and he is using a dvico 6500a networked media player device with a 1 TB drive and is quite happy with it. He can play anything on his network of machines, pull stuff from his hd dish and play it, or store it on the external drive hooked to it and play it directly from there. I'd like to try one but a bit more then I want to spend right now. Western digital makes a similar device that doesn't network for 99 bucks.

The point is not to watch it; the point is just to have it.

Same way like you wouldn't use your numismatic collection to buy a stick of gum, or your inverted Jenny to mail a letter.