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New DVD Recorder With 52 hours Of HDD Recording Time
BlueQuark writes "I thought that this is cool. Everybody needs one.
When I was liviving in Tokyo about a year and a half ago,
Pioneer just released a DVD Recorder, which was quite nice.
Now it looks like Panasonic will have one that does 52 hours.
It's about 200,000 yen or about $1709.00 @ 117.76Tokyo's Y/$ rate.
The blurb is a bit short, but can be found here. Or here is a more complete press release which is at Matsushita's
site."
...a PVR service. If they teamed up with TiVo, they'd have a killer product, and several lawsuits to boot...
It's an interesting idea, but DVD-RAM?!? That means it won't play on any real dvd players. Which wouldn't be so bad, except they slipped in that little line about "compatible with PC audio/video applications" so that you would see that keyword "compatible" and if you're just skimming it, that's what might stick. That seems like a pretty slimy marketing trick to me. In any case, as far as I'm concerned, if it's not compatible with a regular DVD player, what's the point?
This is from the one company that has previously partnered with ReplayTV. I didn't see anything about the software they're using; whether it's their own or from a partner. I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out they're partnering with ReplayTV on this, just like they did with the Showstopper.
With Divx running at Quantizer 2 (Which mean compress it as little as possible, a.k.a.: Highest quality), The bandwidth used is about 2-3 Mbaud. If you use AC3 Audio, the bandwith for that is 192Kbaud - 384Kbaud. So, a maximal estimate would be 3456Kbaud. That's 432 KB/sec. A Single sided/single layer DVD holds about 4GB. 4GB / 432KB = 9709 sec = 161 min = 2.7Hours. Interesting... works out to about the same as a good length (but still ugly) VHS tape.
If you make it double sided, It goes up to 323min/5.4hr. If you can manage to make it record Double-sided, double-LAYERed, you'll get 647min/10.8hr.
Mind you, these are excessive estimates. This would be visibly lossless encoding (not lossless, but you wouldn't be able to tell). It rarely gets up to 3MBaud when you're encoding regular video. 1.5MBaud would be very much sufficient. Use that for the numbers and you can pretty much double it.
Number of minutes:
HQ BQ (High/Best)
SS: 323 161
DS: 647 323
DD: 1294 647
So, at HQ/DD you get 21.5hrs.
not bad. 40gb = near one month of mp3 music = no cd changers anymore! :]
Although this logic doesn't hold for us geeks who know better, people think that once a drive dies you can't get another one.
With removable media, if a DVD cracks or scratches, you can just get another one.
No doubt! I've been looking for a PVR that can record my HDTV signal. So far I've not found one.
Anyone know of a HDTV PVR?