It really amuses me that people weigh so heavily the ability of whether a standalone recorder can do high speed vs. real time dubs to DVD-R.
For perspecitve, a one hour video recorded in XP mode (maximum) quality could be high speed dubbed no faster than 1/2 hour saving about 1/2 hour (not counting the "real time" dub to the HS2 HDD in the first place). Similarly, a 2 hour video could be dubbed no faster than 1/2 hour in high speed saving about an hour and a half. Neither of which are significnat time savers even if you consider multiple dubs. WRT to 6 hour dubs, the quality of such a recording would not be such that I would be cranking out many copies like a high quality event video, so the one time 6 hour real time dub could be done overnight without much fuss or time wasted.
That's why I conduct "real time" dubs to DVD-R in off hours or when I'm not otherwise using the unit (like overnight - people do sleep still, don't they?).
I'm not saying that high speed dubs to DVD-R would not be beneficial, but IMHO the benefit of such a feature should not be weighed that heavily against the balance of the other features and benefits of the standalone DVD recorders including time shifting, on-board storage, real time good quality hardware encoding, menus, editing etc... that balance well against the non-real time PC solutions such as TMPGenc.
I guess people have already forgotten the days of real time analog dubs (including printing to the initial edited DV master) and high quality software mpeg2 encodes that take 6 to 10 times real time (and still do even with today's 2GHz+ processors)!
Vic