Pioneer Introduces 1st DVD Recorder (In Japan)

sanemind noted that Pioneer has announced the world's first consumer level DVD Recorder. Although they are only available in Japan, and the blanks will cost 30-plus bucks, it's still pretty sweet.

Comments

What I'd like to see

[babbage]

I'd like to have one device that can:

• Play my current 750 or so audio CDs (no, I'm not junking that much stuff, and I really don't feel like converting it all to MP3)
• Can play back MP3 encoded data
• Can play back DVD movies
• Can record CD audio, MP3, and DVD formats as well as play them
• Portability would be nice, but not a requirement. It would be nice to use this device in place of my discman in my car, my cd drive in my computer, and in addition to the cd changer with my stereo. I could do without that, but it would be nice. I wouldn't mind having to carry it around a la a ZIP drive.
• If this'll only work on a computer (wouldn't be surprising, I am asking for a bit here), then cannot be Windows specific. I use BeOS about 70% of the time, Win about 20%, and Linux about 10%. 9At school it's 90%/10% Linux/Win and at work it's 60/39/1 Win/Mac/Novell), and I loathe the idea of having to boot to Windows ever time I want to use the drive. If it can't play nice with other systems, I'll keep shopping.

It seems like these are all, generally speaking, the same formats -- in that it's a spinning aluminum disc that's ready by a laser -- and it seems to me that it should be possible to merge together these different uses of the media in the software of one device. I haven't bought a DVD thus far becuase I don't want it to be part of a collection of drives (alng with cd burner etc) that do almost the same thing. That would be such a waste, and I don't have that many free sockets on my computer.

Does anyone know anything about any attempts to merge these technologies together? I'm a broke college student, but I'd be willing to invest in a device that could do all of that for me...

Re:What I'd like to see

[babbage]

Heh. Well, keep in mind that I've been gathering them for like 10 years now, so that's not *that* bad :-). In high school I was pretty much straightedge (in spirit if not in terminology), so when my friends got into beer & pot, I kept buying CDs. They've got a bunch of emtpy bottles & spent roaches to show for their money; I've still got my mountain of music :-), and I'm not planning on spending the time to convert to a newer (and perhaps arguably better, though with drawbacks) format like MP3.

Actually, this touches on a bigger theme anyway: data storage preservation. Tapes wear out, floppy discs and hard drives go bad, CDs are as near as I can tell the best semi-permanent storage we have access to today. The good thing about a book is that it's pretty permanent -- I could go digging in Alexandria & hopefully find books that the Greeks & Egyptians read thousands of years ago (well, assuming I could read the material, but the problems are all on my end, not the book's). Modern media aren't nearly that good. I can wander down to the Salvation Army right now and pick up a stack of Jimi Hendrix & Clash 8-Tracks, but probably won't be able to find anythign to play them with -- and I certainly can't "read" the tapes by myself.

I think backwards compatibility is a vastly underappreciated priority in digital media. If all of today's music is kept on discs that 25 years frow now are hard to play and 100 years from now are just gone, then what will future generatiosn remember of us? We left behind a bunch of useless junk. I know that new formats offer great benefits (encoded as MP3, my 750 audio CDs would fit on a handful of DVD discs, at most, right?), but we shouldn't be forced to re-record everythign with each new generation of the storage technology. It should be officially okay to keep the old stuff around too. If we can't do that, then we risk creatign a possibly Very Large Hole for future generations.

Hard Drives cheaper?

[Greyfox]

I've been seeing 40+ GB hard drives lately for in the vicinity of $200. How much storage is a DVD writable disk capable of? Unless the storage media is significantly less expensive, why not use one of the readily available TV-In cards and record to hard drive? It's not all that hard to swap hard drives out, either.

Um...yea

[pirodude]

Though is is quite good news I must say u probably should visit the link before posting. If you did you would see:

Tokyo, Japan, November 25, 1999

When in US, Recording time

[Kalper]

My largest concerns with DVD-Recorders are:

(1) will they ever make it to the US within a reasonable amount of time (1 year), or will they be held up forever by industry copyright concerns?

(2) Will these things really produce reasonable quality output? $30/disc will be a lot of money if you have to record in the 2hr mode to get something reasonable... I had a TiVo for a week and took it back because it just didn't produce a high enough quality picture in any mode that could record more than a days worth of programs.

Re:How long will it be...

[Grog6]

The dvd machine(hollywood, not the player) has already fscked this up for us. if you note, in the print," supports all copy protection " this means that unless the hardware eng. who designed it with a backdoor you could drive a truck thru, you can't copy dvd's. However, a dvd played through a macrovision stripper, into the inputs would probably record ok though...

Read The Small Print

[DeepPurple]

It looks like disks recorded on this will not be playable on legacy DVD players. The article says:

Pioneer, as well as other major hardware manufacturers, will introduce Video Recording Format-ready DVD-Video players, and it will be possible to replay DVD-RW recorded discs on those players too

It also mentions that the Video Recording Format could be made compliant with DVD video but hasn't, you can probably guess the reason why.

As for copy protection macrovision is added on output and is not encoded onto the disk. Thus using the analogue input (scrubbed of macrovision) it should be possible to copy disks. As far as I know no one has incorporated an analogue Copy Generation Management System into DVD. I assume that the digital system will let you make one digital copy of a disk then stop any further copies. The disks that have CSS would probably have the appropriate flags to stop digital output working on a player with this facility (non exist yet).

The article goes further:

Furthermore, the DVR-1000 implements secure media ID detection functions, which form a key element in disabling playback of discs containing unauthorized copies.

I assume that this means that each DVD-RW contains a ID so that only their disks can be used. However I don't see how this could be used to prevent unorthorized copies (you just need to use their recorders and media).

It is not at all clear if you could record digital TV (cable or satallite) in a digital manor onto these devices. Would the cable company for you to pay for the privilege of recording their programs or would they prevent it and force you to buy a device such as a ReplayTV ?

In short this is a technology that has been hamstrung by the movie studios.

-dp

Re:Read The Small Print

[DeepPurple]

You are confused.

Macrovision level 1 as used on VHS video is indeed part of the video signal.

Macrovision level 2 is implemented as a burst during the vertical blanking signal between PAL (or NTSC) frames which confuses the auto gain control circuit on a VCR. Since the vob files on the disk only contain an MPEG program stream. You couldn't physically put macrovison in the vob. The macrovison is generated by the digital to analogue converter (RAMDAC in the video world) attached to the MPEG decoder. This is why it is possible to hack many players not produce macrovison.

If this was not true I would not be able to watch DVD's on my LCD projector which is just as susceptable to macrovision (level 2) as VCR's are.

It is certainly true that the flag to tell the player to produce macrovision is in the vob but macrovison itself can't be.

-dp

I knew this one had been posted before

[Anders H�ckersten]

Pioneer to sell first recordable DVD decks