Help me pick out a DVD recorder

[Mod_Man_Extreme]

This is the best Capture card you can get and is all you'll ever need at a nice affordable price:

http://yokotate.hazard-city.de/

[gtmtnbiker]

This is the best Capture card you can get and is all you'll ever need at a nice affordable price:

http://yokotate.hazard-city.de/

Are you suggesting that he buys a Holo card? According to the website, the cards are rare and hard-to-find.

Update, Sep. 2009: From time to time I get an email asking where to find Holo cards nowaday. And honestly, it's been getting harder and harder. I haven't got an eBay alert for more than a half year now and the sightings on various home cinema boards get rarer as well. Spatz (a home cinema dealer in Germany) still has got new Holo I and Holo II cards on hand, but the prices are steep (expect 300 EUR for a Holo 1 and 500 EUR for a Holo II). There are alternatives though. The PMS Sweetspot can be bought here in the UK. It has RGBs and Component inputs and is quite affordable. The Blackmagic Intensity Pro is an alternative as well and it even got HDMI input for modern-day capturing (might have 240p problems though). The Holo is still the only card with a hardware deinterlacer on board though. The other cards are DirectShow devices, which means that they display nicely in DScaler or iuLabs iuVCS (my recommended capture and display app), but any deinterlacing has to be applied via a software filter (meaning you need a proper CPU with suffiicient power)

[CRTGAMER]

I edited the first post.

I want to get a DVD recorder now. Any one ever use one before? Suggestions?

Just wondering how a multi-write DVD-R would come out? Perhaps just MPEG bites? Every recording is a new session that gets written to the disc, a small risk of losing all the previous videos due to directory track being re-written and a disc error. Maybe not an issue since DVRs are popular. Then if the write would be proprietary and only run on the DVR? Some blocks to check off before the purchase.

[Ziggy]

Well I'm not interested in rewrites and whatnot. I only wanna take recordings on my DVR and archive them on DVDs. I mostly have hour long specials from Nat Geo, Discovery, Science Channel, etc. I just wanna put them on DVDs (to play them in DVD players) so that I can free up space on my DVR.

The DVD recorder seems infinitely simpler to use rather than capturing the video on my PC and having to encode it / master it to DVD. My only concern with the DVD recorder is maintaining the widescreen ration. If my videos turned out to be letterbox they'd be absolutely useless to me.

[CRTGAMER]

Definitely the convenient way to go over tying up a PC capture, then going into the encoding process.

Seems to me that should be the same footage, analogy of recording on tape. Not direct digital recording so the pic will be only as good as output-input. Seems like what you see on screen should be the actual recording be it widescreen or no, how good a quality, unsure. A one session burn seems like it should play fine on most DVD players that can handle DVD-Rs. Something to scrutinize is to be sure recording is not proprietary.

[eSPy]

Is this sort of thing good enough for completely hobby captures?

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.5707

I realize it has been mentioned that USB ones aren't very good.

Ivo.

i got that one and it is pretty good. usefull for recording VHS tapes to your harddrive or converting them to DVD.

i bought the more expensive model (http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.26319) as it can do PAL60 and NTSC433.

[Ivo]

Is this sort of thing good enough for completely hobby captures?

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.5707

I realize it has been mentioned that USB ones aren't very good.

Ivo.

i got that one and it is pretty good. usefull for recording VHS tapes to your harddrive or converting them to DVD.

i bought the more expensive model (http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.26319) as it can do PAL60 and NTSC433.

I'm glad you posted this info. Also, I'd like to confirm... Does this also enable you to hook up an older console (say, a Saturn) to a TFT computer monitor to play (not even to record stuff)?

Ivo.

[Ivo]

Hey again,

I'm going to buy one of the ones available on DX. Anyone here can tell the difference between them? I'm in Europe so I need PAL support, but I don't know what PAL60 is for, but the more expensive one supports it:
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.26319

Other than that, I probably want one of the cheaper ones, either this:
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.5707

or this?
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.11267

I don't think I want the one that supports 4 inputs:
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.11127

Ivo.