HD DVD Recorder

I'm stunned that no one has responded to this. I'm sure that a lot of people here would love to have one, but for ordinary consumers, I doubt that they would have a lot of interest. BTW, I'd say that such a unit MUST have a HDD.

Why would you not want to have such a device include the ability to burn to blank Blu Ray disks? That would allow recording the original MPEG2 stream without any need for transcoding to a more efficient codec, which seems like it would simplify the device.

That said, here's what I would want to see:
1. HD component video inputs and a built in ATSC tuner.
2. Some sort of hard drive, although it doesn't need to be huge.
3. The ability to perform basic editing from the hard drive before burning to disk in order to edit out commercials.
4. Reasonable recording capacity sufficient to record two hours or more onto a single layer disk.

How much would I pay? That depends on the feature set. But I'd probably be willing to pay more for a device that records to either blank DVDs or Blu-Ray disks versus one that is DVD-only.

What I'd like to see is a recorder virtually identical to the Magnavox 515, but with a larger hard drive and the ability to burn to Blu-Ray discs. (I seriously doubt you could get much HD material on a standard DVD.)

Having the recorder be able to take high def input by way of HDMI and component would be a good move too.

Of course, if it could also have cable card slots, that'd also be a plus.

Could I ask why the interest in having it be a High Def recorder, but only be able to burn to standard DVDs? I mean, how much High Def material (time-wise) could you actually fit on a regular DVD?

Well, considering the answers to Dear Walmart: We Need a HDD/BRD/DVD Recorder in North America! easily you can sell between 100 and 300 machines, however each one will be cost around U$400.

Of course, I'll buy one.

And since I doubt people who read these forums are the only ones that would buy the machines, there have to be a lot more than just a few hundred.

Downscale to 720p and recode to H.264/AVC with 4.5Mbps bitrate and you can put about 2 hr of HD content on a DVD-R in AVCHD format. It won't look too bad unless you have a real big display. That way if you want to go cheap and help keep the price around $400-500 you would put in a combo BD-reader/DVD burner. You would always need a BD-ROM drive in the unit to be able to play any AVCHD format disks you generate.

Looks like its going to be even more important you make this thing dual voltage, PAL/NTSC comaptible plus IRE level adustable and any other requirements that allows it to work in all countries or is it cheaper to manuafacture 2 types, different guts but same case to cater for each market than one unit that suits all markets?...... DVDR is now dying in Aus too.


Yep, heaps will sell on ebay/amazon or what ever once people discover them which will depend on the type of marketing or if you just want to rely on word of mouth and people slowy passing around links. I would not have found most of the stuff i found on here if it was not for this forum. A lot of gadgets and devices are just nor really advertised much if at all and you go to hunt for them.