|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
The trend in home recording looks like being digital, but not hard drive as I first expected. It looks as if -* s-video is nearly dead (no Panasonic machines, still one JVC but I cannot locate any others)
* the flirtation with hard drives is short lived. JVC had a machine which would do s-video + hard drive but it was so unpopular they have withdrawn production of it
* the next step, being pioneered by SONY, - home DVD recording. So, instead of time shifting by tape, we record a DVD.
I'm not sure how to react. Access will be far quicker & easier but it remains to be seen about quality and reliability. Yet on second thoughts it will not have much of a task to better VCRs, even the s-video variety!
Anyone experienced the new recording DVD machines?
Follow Ups:
I have not tried it yet.
However, I also heard there are HD analog VHS machines. Personally, I expect to see them all die at HDVDs whenever they show up. It's the cure for DVD malodies I know. Then, I would finally switch from LDs since DVDs would fially be more than a digitized LD signal.The carrier wave would have to be stripped in order to fit more resolution & more frames. Then, superior lossless compession could be used with superior results. However, that would mean investment in pattern recognition & morphing technology to autogenerate more frames for liquidity of motion.
» moderate Mart £ « Planar Asylum
John,What do you mean by "s-video is nearly dead?" I was under the impression that S-Video is a connection method between two different devices for getting a video signal from one to the other. Since you are discussing recording, I'm guessing you mean S-VHS. But I don't want to assume and be wrong, thus I ask for clarification.
Around here I see lots of Re-Play and TiVo HD recorders. One of the draws to TiVo for me is the optional TiVo-net card that lets you put the TiVo on your home ethernet. This is a pretty good way to get video into your computer.
I didn't even know that Sony had a DVD recorder. Panasonic, Pioneer, and Philips have had machines out for a while. If Sony is pioneering home DVD recording, they aren't blowing their horn as hard as they usually do.
VCD recorders have been around for years. Not as good as DVD recorders, but they record onto cheap CD-R media. There are some that can even record SVCDs.
I agree that VHS machines are on the way out. For a replacement of the lowly VHS recorder, I think a VCD recorder is a fair choice considering the low cost of the machines and the cheap media. But it is hard to give a VCD recorder the nod when DVD recorders are making their presence known.
The header was referring to VCRs so I thought my reference about s-video was clearly meant to apply to VHS machines, not s-video generally. Sorry if you were confused.However, the emphasis is on component these days so interest in s-video generally is declining. No question it will be with us for quite awhile yet because it is considerably better than composite.
No need to apologize John, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't making a blunder. I agree that it is getting harder to find S-VHS machines these days. The last two that I bought (one a Mitsubishi, the other a JVC) were in the sub US$150 and had performance to match that price point. Very sad, but at least they had S-Video connections. I have never seen any VCR (either VHS or S-VHS) with component connections. I'll have to drop by a shop again if you are saying that the emphasis these days is on component connections and S-Videos are drying up in the VCR world. That would be cool.
Component on VHS tape machines has never appeared as a consideration but component output is (justifiably) the flavour of the month with quality DVD and I guess it is with the hard drive digital machines also(???).s-video was the quality choice with laserdisc with no component output ever appearing that I'm aware of but we seem to be moving on. Which direction we will end up with for home recording is the 64 million dollar question at the moment. And that is assuming the moguls do not prevent copying full stop. In the meantime I'll stick with s-video taping to time shift.
This is more likely to be the reason for the demise of tape-recording on a VCR... no body seems to care to keep recordings for a long-long-time... the keep them to watch when it is more convenient and then don't watch again! VHS tapes don't hold up well to long time use and re-use.
Their model HM-HDS1EU , illustrated at
http://www.jvc-australia.com/frame_hddvid.asp
had such a hard drive system inside but has been withdrawn from sale, reportedly due to lack of interest. I would suspect the high price (divide by 2 to get USD) did not help + many people are incapable of programming a normal VHS so organising a hard drive would be far too daunting.Now the US market is significantly larger so there might be a large enough base to support TiVo enthusiasts, just as laserdiscs thrived in a limited way in the US but not here much at all. However DVD has taken off here because it is relatively cheap and easy to use (although some of the menus drive me nuts).
I'm not sure about how useful or appealing I would find a TiVo system anyway after having quite a lot of bad experience with hard discs dying in computers. Sure they are now cheap, but how good is their longer term reliability? If your hard drive crashes with 10 movies on board you have lost the lot!
Yes, tape is a messy medium just like cassetes but it is portable between players and friends. And I disagree about tapes not lasting. We have 20 year old ones that are high quality - but they were good ones at the start. Their is a lot of cheap rubbish around if you are not too concerned about what it might do to recorder heads.
All that aside I share concern about moves to prevent copying.
Interesting times
i have been building my own home PCs for years now and the reliability of hard-drives have dramatically improved over the years. I have not had a hard-drive crash for a long-long-time since i have learned what are the reliable ones of the moment.Here in the US, Tivo has had great success and is still growing.
http://www.tivo.com/images/02_q4_results_final.pdf and i believe it is mostly due to perhaps and Americans wanting to not miss their favorite programs and keep them just long enough to watch them when they get a chance...So, at leats in the US (i'm assuming you are in Australia?) it seems that hard-drive recorders are gaining much popularity.
I've had 3 Quantum SCSI hard drives fail on me and one SCSI Seagate. Fortunately I had CD backups but those crashes caused considerable trouble and expense.Maybe I'm unlucky but I've also had motherboard failures in the last 12 months. The first caused me to ditch the desktop and get another. So help me if the new motherboard did not have a heart failure after only a few weeks and had to be replaced :-( under warranty.
So perhaps you can understand my scepticism about reliability!
These days I use this HP notebook more than the desktop and the notebooks have the reputation of poorer reliability than desktops so I guess I'm a devil for punishment.
i hate to say it, but check your power supply and/or conditioner... if you don't have a surge/conditioner on your system i would definetly get one... the reliability of my system went way up when i switched to an Enermax power supply coupled with a monster HTS2000 for my PC.... i have not had problems with RAM/MB(Asus/Abit), hard drives (Cheetah 15K RPM), or anything else for a few years... i mostly attribute that to the clean power i give it.. I cycle often and still don't have any issues with no power-on. I had a bad CPU about 4 years ago and a bad stick of RAM about that long ago and that was the last time i had problems... my system gets upgraded when i can double the CPU speed (about once a year, but most of the system satys intact, or gets a new MB if the old one does not support the CPU).
... have a UPS in place and pretty stable supply here anyway. But I'll follow your suggestion and check it out. Guess I'm just unlucky.
Hi John, do you think HD recording is already gone? I don't think it's even started yet. HDrives are really cheap and are sure to turn up more and more in players, like the Yamaha XXX 1000 CD recorder.
But just what do you think we are going to be able to record ? How much protection is out there to prevent copying.
I agree that current VCRs are on their way out. But it will take years for it to happen. Remember there is 90% or more market penetration for the VCR. Hard drives are being used with satellite systems in N. America, how much is open to question. DVD recording may well be the wave of the future if its not killed off by the big movie companies, whose greed & stupidity knows no bounds.
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors: