DVD-R ? Home cinema. [Archive] - SXOC Bulletin Board

Mr_Sukebe

05-10-2002, 23:51

I couldn't yet comment on the best version yet.

However, I'd put forward a few thoughts on the matter (please note that this is what I believe to be presently true, if I'm wrong on anything, just pipe up):
- None of the standalone recorders can record digitally from another DVD drive
- None of the standalone recorders can record anything better than stereo sound
- To achieve DVD quality video recording, you're limited to 4.7gb per disk, which is not enough for some longer films. So you either span disks (not good), or run in a lower quality. I can't comment on the differences between compression ratios, but I'm assuming it'll be noticeable.

Now chances are that at a later date the first two points I suggest are likely to be resolved.
Bearing in mind the cost of actually buying one of these units, I'd consider taking a different route, i.e. home entertainment PC.
How about a PC that can record films off air with the same quality as DVDR, can copy DVDs, pause part way through a film whilst still recording (as per TIVO).

To my knowledge you can now do the above. All you'd need would be a PC with:
- Reasonable amount of memory
- Any entry level processor would be fast enough now (even the slowest Celeron or Duron is fast enough)
- A big hard drive (or two) for recording onto. Buying a motherboard that supports RAID would allow you to put a number of hard drives on. Imagine 480Gb hard drive space for films. That's a lot of recording.
- A good vid card for dealing with recoding. The newer ATi All in One can do this. i.e. take in a video feed, record to hard drive in MPEG2 format and output to a TV as required.

Personally I'd go with the PC route. If you focused on creating a PC that is quiet as against really fast, and bought a nice looking case, might be possible to integrate well into your living room. How about that as a way to impress you friends?