Experiences with DVD hard disk recorders?

[heinz-oz]

Hi guys and girls. I have started to toy with the idea to replace a recently failed VHS VCR with a hard disk based DVD recorder.

Since I'm one of the guys who constantly advice against mpeg file editing, I find myself in a bit of a dilemma. On one hand I dislike the idea of getting taped/recorded shows/movies to edit them further but I did have my wife insisting on archiving some of her favored movies on DVD in the past. I expect this to happen in future also Since this usually would require the removal of lengthy commercial breaks in order to save disk space, the recordings would need to be edited, I guess. In the past I captured the VHS tapes via the pass through function of my Panasonic GS-400 and wondered if there was an advantage in using the recorder mpeg2 files directly, exported from the recorder by means of DVD disks of course, or to capture from the recorders analog output and to continue with the old process from there?

What are the collective experiences with editing mpeg2 files from a DVD recorder and do any of you have a preferred brand and model of recorder or strongly advice against one?

What are the pitfalls to look out for?

Your comments would be very much appreciated.

[lancecarr]

Hi Heinz,
Here's my take on it for what it's worth.
I figure most of the DVD recorders are going to be recording in MPEG2 as you know.
Now there has been and still is, discussion going on about the suitability of MPEG2 for editing. Given that it was originally a distribution format and given some of the first feeble attempts by the software developers, that discussion was warranted. However with the introduction of the first DVD cams and recorders many years ago the inevitable happened, people wanted to edit their footage. At that time all hell broke loose because the technology of doing that was in its infancy.
I for one was foolish enough to jump on to that original bandwagon with a DVD cam and although I didn't hit too many problems I decided to go to DV AVI and sit it out for a while.

I think there are two important points here for you to look at. The first is that the NLE's on the market have come a long way in the editing of MPEG2s and the products you now own are more than capable of handling the simple tasks you would want to do with your resulting MPEGs.
Secondly, it has been my observation from this forum and others that the MAIN problem anyone has with editing MPEG2's is the attitude that I should need to know NOTHING about the technology I am using, from cam to DVD player and somehow it should all just work. If it doesn't then there is something wrong with SOMETHING but there is nothing wrong with me.
I know of only ONE actual BUG in VS regarding the use of MPEGs and transitions, causing a tiny, almost imperceptible jump in thevideo, that no-one has been able to solve.
Now you are an old hand on the board and your efforts to help others clearly show that you have a grip on the technology and the ability to "think" your way through any problems rather than yelling at the screen! Although I think we all do that at some point!

So I think the only thing you need to concern yourself with is which DVD recorder to purchase. I wish I could offer some advice in this area but I don't have one myself.
Good luck.

[heinz-oz]

Thanks for the input and the laurels

The more I think about it the more I come to the conclusion that I may have a use for one of the old, retired PC corpses sitting in my garage right now.

A rethink of my current set up should give me a spare HDD, a few quit wisely spent may give me one of these Hauppauge PVR 350 TV tuner cards. The rest of it I should still have floating around somewhere. That should allow me to built a PVR. Heck, I might even rebuilt my internet machine to be used for that. Since I wouldn't be doing any editing on that PC, only recording, the running of AV and firewall should not have an influence on that.

Recording at max quality, around 12 Mbps, should give me good enough mpeg2 quality to do the limited editing needed without losing sync and/or quality.

I would not envisage this set up to be used for actually watching on the TV either and, hence, might even be able to get away with a slightly less sophisticated TV tuner card like the PVR250.

Still tossing around a few ideas and will need some time to come to a conclusion. Any ideas and experiences, pro and con, would be greatly appreciated.

[lancecarr]

Hi Heinz
That sounds like a very good idea.
I can only speak from my experience with the notoriously proprietary Sony cam and using VS8 at the time. Please note! I was using VS8 which was supposed to be an out of sync disaster!
The things I learned were that the bitrate of the DVD standard peak at 10,000kbps. It's not designed to maintain that rate, it is only designed to peak at that rate for high motion/high contrast scenes. The cam recorded VBR at 9800 and to be honest the quality was vey good given the specs of the cam. I say this because I don't really think you need to aim so high on the bitrate. Everything I do now from DV AVI is at 8000 CBR and it all looks good to me.
The issue of degradation by re-rendering is to some degree over blown. One or even two re-renders, by the time they get to an SD TV screen, seem to produce no discernable degradation when using analogue viewing devices. (Eyes)!
Now given I was working with VS8, and we all know the activity that was occurring on the forum at that time re OOS, I NEVER had a problem except once. I got lazy and didn't defrag after transferring the files from the cam, I left everything running in the background...and it was a lot, I burned from the timeline and only then did I get an out of sync problem. TOTALLY my fault.
I think if you can set up a system that can slap about 9800kbps down to a hard drive with plenty of real estate available you are not going to go wrong. You know all the rules about housekeeping, background services and processes, defrags, no burning from the timeline, create a DVD compliant MPEG before burning blah, blah, blah!
As long as each step of the process is relatively stress free for the system you will have no problem.

[heinz-oz]

That's exactly my thinking too. Mind you, I did have sync problems with editing mpeg2. That's why I have been advising against it all these years. I never had a problem burning straight from the time line though. Then again, I don't use VS either.

It's going to be a new challenge but first I have to decide for myself if I want to go the PVR way or stick with a stand alone DVD recorder.

Decisions, decisions...

[skier-hughes]

Stand alone dvd recorders mostly, if not all of them, record in 704x576 or 480, rather than the normal 720x.
This can cause problems when editing, importing into apps etc.

I get loads of discs that peope have recorded for their friends and sent it to them, only to find that they can't watch it on the dvd player.

I'm currently doing a whole museums back library of a certain genre because they were held on VHS tapes, which are mostly thrown away now because why would they want them, they'd got them on dvd....... to find that now they have them on dvd they don't have anything they can play or watch without using a pc.

I find it often a laborious task converting the dvds from dvd recorder ones to normal ones, it's time consuming and doesn't pay well becasue of the multitude of formats in which they can be recorded in.

Saying that, I do have a dvd/hdd recorder myself, a panasonic model, dvr-540x, with built in digital tuner and I find it great for home viewing in place of the vcr, but I certainly wouldn't use it for anything else.

[lancecarr]

That's interesting Graeme because the Sony cam I was mentioning in my post was an NTSC and recorded MPEGs at 704x480 and I never had a problem with them as long as I maintained that ratio throughout. It is, after all part of the DVD specs although not as common as the 720. What I did find early was that in my ignorance of that I changed it all from 704 to 720 but the result was that the image became slightly stretched. Not obviously, just enough for the missus to feel she looked pretty good on the DVD! With a little investigation I then reverted to the 704 and had no problems on editing or playback of the discs. Those DVDs played fine on a multitude of players and VS never had a problem with them.
Makes me wonder what the differences are that would give you trouble from DVD recorders.

[phd]

I have been recording TV shows and movies for years with a Hauppauge 250 and now DVRs.

Editing is quick and easy since I just remove commercials. I use VideoReDo and think it's the best. A few frames are reencoded around cut points and you don't notice the difference. The rest of the file is passed through as is.

With the Hauppauge you should record in a DVD compliant format so no reencoding is necessary. 5-6Mbps is usually more than sufficient. But you can experiment.

I have Panasonic DVRs with both the DVD and hard drive. I can offload at my convenience to DVD-RAM and edit on the computer. I personally use DVD-RAM for better quality and more rewriting capability. They record in 720. I've looked at others and they also record 720. The DVD camcorder does record in 704 but I have not had compatibility issues.

Stay away from the no-name DVD recorders. They are cheap for a reason. You might have compatibility and editing issues. They are also not very user friendly for programming recordings. Their interface reminds me of the first generation VCRs.

Being that I make sure all my capture sources are DVD compliant, I can basically pass through the video with no quality loss and tremendous time savings. Save times for edited output files is a couple of minutes per hour with a P4 1.6 machine. Separate source and destination drives to speed the workflow.

[skier-hughes]

That's interesting Graeme because the Sony cam I was mentioning in my post was an NTSC and recorded MPEGs at 704x480 and I never had a problem with them as long as I maintained that ratio throughout. It is, after all part of the DVD specs although not as common as the 720. Those DVDs played fine on a multitude of players and VS never had a problem with them.
Makes me wonder what the differences are that would give you trouble from DVD recorders.

I've not tried playing my recorded dvds back on any other player, just stating the amount of work I get from working on dvds recorded by dvd recorders is now more than vhs or cine conversions. I'm not sure if its the fact that dvd recorders can record in various bitrates, giving many hours on a disc that makes them incompatible, whether its the type of recording they've done, ie normal or VR, or if it's just one type of recorder that causes the problem.

I do know the museums archives were recorded on a Panasonic dvd recorder using vr recording onto verbatim +R discs. I don't bother asking any other clients for their details, as most of them are recipients of discs rather than makers.

It certainly keeps me busy, if not making me rich, as people don't see this as a worthwhile use of their money, unlike cine say, which they can't play any more etc... this is more of an inconvenience and something they find hard to understand.

[heinz-oz]

I have opted to buy a Digital set top box with HDD. It was an offer too good to refuse from a local dealer. It's a dual tuner device with a 160GB HDD. It allows me to record all our digital broadcasts and record 2 different events while watching a third.

The price for that was only half of what I would have had to fork out for a Hauppauge PVR 350 card. Thus far I'm happy but have not yet tried to edit any of the recordings.

The unit has a USB 2.0 interface to allow for data transfer to a PC. Possibly will give this try tonight.

[heinz-oz]

I did give this new toy a spin last night. The transfer of recorded files from the PVR to my laptop via the USB 2.0 interface was easy. The problems started afterwards.

The manual for my device states this:

Special Note : After Installing the USB explorer program (Comes with the unit on CD)
and the tranfer of files has been completed from the Hotchip 160PVR to PC, then in order to play
these files using windows media player, a XP_Codec_Pack must be downloaded from :
www.free-codecs.com/XP_Codec_Pack_download.htm
Please Install, this codecs pack onto your PC and use the USB explorer programs " T " (In the Top Toolbar) function to convert it into a .mpeg file, after the conversion has completed you may use your .mpeg player ,
For example - Windows Media Player or similar program to view the file that has been converted.

Because I have all sorts of codecs on my editing machine, I didn't bother to follow that advice. I converted a small recording, 29 minutes of it, to mpeg2 using the fixed settings of this USB Explorer program. The resultant mpeg2 file plays in MediaPlayer but the picture is jumping like the player is struggling to keep up. The picture quality is just superb but there is no sound

I loaded this file into MSP 8 and trimmed it to what I need. There is no sound track shown in MSP. The properties looked all ok, the bitrate was stated as 15,000 kbps.

I created a new DVD compliant mpeg2 file from this source file in MSP and burned that to a DVD -RW disk to play in a stand alone DVD player. The picture is still excellent but, as expected, there is no sound.

So far so good. I proceeded to download this XP-codec-pack to make sure that there was nothing missing.

What do you know, after installing this codec pack, the proverbial s**t did hit the fan, sort of expected that

MediaPlayer will not play any of these files anymore but will give me that dreaded error that it has encountered a problem and needs to close.. rats. This is followed immediately by the same error pertaining to WinExplorer as well In both cases, a module "vsfilter.dll" is to blame.

I tried to run the mpeg file through VideoReDo but that encountered the same problem as well

I uninstalled the codec pack and restored my system to an earlier restore point. No more problem. Still no sound on my file though.

When running this mpeg file through VideoReDo I got this error message

but the file plays in MediaPlayer, of course there is no sound.

Still have a lot of testing to do here

[lancecarr]

Nothing to add except...oh god!
I can only offer moral support at this point!
Keep us informed cos' the best learning curve is one taken at the expense of someone else!

Actually (this is an edit) I just thought of something. Obviously there is supposed to be something in that "free codec pack" (shudder) to make this run.
Did you try to run the untouched imported files through Gspot to find the exact codec?

[phd]

What problem did you encounter with VideoReDo? Please see above


Did it play OK? Was it silent also? Yes

There is an issue with no audio frames output. Try clicking on the menu: Tools>Select Stream to select a different audio stream.

If you don't don't see any audio tracks, Click on the menu: Tools>Options>Stream Parameters and check "Ignore Transport Stream Maps"

What are the file properties in VideoReDo? Load the file and press Ctrl+L and paste the info. There's a button near the bottom of the window "Copy to Clipboard" Shall do

Also, you should post over on the VRD forum. They'll get you working OK.
http://www.videoredo.net/msgBoard/index.php

At this point in time I do not blame VRD for my woes just posted here to give others the benefit of my experiences.

Edited by Heinz-Oz, comments in RED

[heinz-oz]

Nothing to add except...oh god!
I can only offer moral support at this point!
Keep us informed cos' the best learning curve is one taken at the expense of someone else!

Actually (this is an edit) I just thought of something. Obviously there is supposed to be something in that "free codec pack" (shudder) to make this run.
Did you try to run the untouched imported files through Gspot to find the exact codec?

Never mind Lance, only, where do I get a copy of this "Gspot" program? Do you have a link?

I will muck around with it some more tonight and post my "experiences"

[lancecarr]

Well that I can help with!
http://www.headbands.com/gspot/