Slashdot Mirror
DVD / Hard Drive Recorder With 28-Day Capacity
fenimor writes "Panasonic today unveiled new DVD-recoders with astonishing 709 hours video recording capacity. The top model has onboard components of a good PC: 400GB hard drive, Ethernet port, broadband receiver, SD Memory Card slot, and a PCMCIA card. The DVD recorder is the fastest in the industry as it can record a one-hour program onto DVD-R disc in just 56 seconds. Internet access allows users to program recording through cell phones or PCs while away from home."
Oooh, that will go nicely with my Netflix account. ;)
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
of space for the sex lifes of all slashdot readers i guess
Easy! All it needs to do is detect and remove the ad breaks.
OK. I have a computer with video in, a DVD+-R drive and 300 GB of hard drive space. Just about anybody upgrade their system with the same for about $400. Right? A little more if you want digital video in.
And it's user-friendly. Got a remote control and everything.
So how much is Panasonic's system, and how would it be better for me than what I've already got.
www.kitchengeek.com -- Nosh for
I wonder if you can plug a webcam into one of those things. 700 hours... yep, no need to change tape too often, and that DVD burning speed will also be handy for archiving. But now you will always be able to tell your girlgriend what exactly she did at 16:34, 15 days ago.
Surely, we can't let these BLATANTLY piracy-inducing machines to make criminals of all our poor innocent children!!
Quick, someone call Jack Valenti!
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
I first thought "28-Day Capacity" meant the contents disappear after 28 days, and that this was just another MPAA scheme. :)
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
Obviously, to fill that capacity you'll need one of these.
Okay... so its a dumb joke. Give me a break. I've got a chronic ear-wax build up and its giving me a migraine.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
I've got a Tivo with 120 hours on it. I can't KEEP UP with it. Half the stuff "spills off" for having too many copies (I stick with the default 5 episodes max for most things) or the suggestions just time out.
Granted, it's nice to be able to thumb through that much content when I don't feel like my normal stuff, but 700 hours worth!? (Yeah, there's always archival and keeping your DVD library on the hard drive is convenient but... c'mon... how hard is it to pull the DVD out of the case and put it into the drive?)
Great. Now all we need is some decent programs to record. I don't think there has been 700 hours of quality television in the history of the medium. (called a medium because it is neither rare nor well done - ba-dum-chhh!)
Lies. The bandwidth total for a 30 min of NTSC is over 10 times the storage they claim is similar to a TV broadcast, expecially if the show was full of cut scenes special effects (music videos) and hi freq static.
Advertisers love to lie by factors of 10
Advertisers love to claim that standard VHS NTSC is three times crappier than it actually is.
Sony loves to do it this month with their non-mp3 mp3 players specs and storage and battery life.
Now the idiocy just keeps gettign out of hand.
Remember the year 1991 : Hard drives from many many suppliers claimed over 100,000 hours MTBF.
100,000 hours!!! some claimed 150,000!!! its all started with a lie that kept douobling every couple years.
Now we have 56 second total time to burn a genuine broadcast.
In three years they will claim 4 milliseconds.
goddamned liars
It also only says it writes an hour of video in 56 seconds, but it doesn't say that it does it on DVD. How long does it take to write a CD at 48x+?
It's not a DVD-Video disc, obviously. It's just dumping a CD-sized MPEG-4 onto the disc, or hell even less. I could make an hour-long video clip that would fit on a couple floppies, but I cant imagine it being worth watching.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
As to a commercial deletion feature. I will settle for a gain detector (in case you had not noticed commercials are significantly louder than the program itself) that creates a seperate chapter for commercial breaks that can be skipped easily if the viewer desires. That will satisfy the broadcasters that the commercials are being seen, while letting the users do what they have every right to do, skip the ads on recordings.
My 80Gb Tivo will record 80 hours (3 1/3 days) of video at "Basic Quality," which is equivalent to a low quality VHS recording (by VHS standards). Therefore, a 400Gb hard drive, using Tivo's standards anyway, will yield 16 2/3 days of video--yet they claim 28 days at that capacity. If that is the case, the picture will suck so much that you'll have to up the recording quality level and will get much less than 28 days worth of video.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
a very useful part for my electrical engineering project,
which I will be setting up in the girl's bathroom.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
That's around 160 KB/s, not Kb/s. That works out to 1.2Mb/s, which is passable for basic quality video.
And they're going to keep re-coding the thing until they get it right!
Beta - no relationship to Betamax.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
No! RTFA, it's a combined unit (Panasonic has other ones already availible) think DVR with the capability to burn DVDs. The article headline is correct (well maybe not about the 28 day part unless you don't mind your video looking like crap)
Actually, I doubt you can fit the pr0n collection of a single slashdotter on that 400Gb drive.
This would be highly welcome as I'm often away from home and miss shows I might want to record, also could give peace of mind that it is programmed to record the show you really really really don't want to miss.
Of course, it being PC-like and on the internet, I wonder how secure it is. I'd hate to got on a trip in July, hoping this is recording stages of the Tour de France and coming home to a title "SUXX0RS11 UR 0WN3D1!" and a mess of Oprah shows.
the horror, the horror
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Let's see.
400 GB/709 HR = 577 MB per minute.
1x DVD is about 4.8 GB/HR.
8X DVD is 8 times faster or 600 MB per minute.
"Excellent Picture Quality" is in the eye of the beholder. I still think that VHS looks better than SVCD OR those DIVX files you speak of. Besides, if they allow burning to DVD they are probably using MPEG2.
It's gotta be the compression they're using. After all, they can fit 709 hours onto a 400GB disk, so an hour of video takes up about half a gigabyte -- not 4.7GB. This is not going to be an hour of full-quality video.
For years they've been dreading the spectre of easy conversion of DVDs to files on a computer. Now that it's *FAST* and easy they're going to be scared.
I would expect to see more attacks against computer makers and users by the MPAA on the order of what happened/is happening with the RIAA.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
It's perfectly possible to get (pretty low quality) broadcast video into 160kB/s (Bytes not bits).
Tivo varies from 192kB/s for its lowest quality (giving 12 and a half days on this machine) to 672kB/s for the highest (giving about 3 and a half days).
28 days will only allow VCD quality but people put up with VHS for 20 years, and that was worse than VCD.
Personally, I am in favor of devices that carry PCMCIA because I like saying that acronym.
No, Vern. They just let him in.
That's the first thing I thought of. Using these things in large security systems to keep archives would seem to be the most likely application.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
56 seconds? But I want it now!
I have an older model Panasonic DVD recorder with hard drive, the DMR-E100H. It's got a 120 GB disk which they describe as holding 160 hours. I usually record in higher quality so it holds half that or less.
It does have a high-speed record feature and can record an hour DVD in a couple of minutes. I'm not sure how it works. Sometimes it seems like the quality is not as high when I do it like this, but maybe that's my imagination.
I also have a TiVo and what I miss most on the Panasonic is the lack of a program guide. The best you can do is use the VCR Plus codes from TV Guide but otherwise you have to manually enter the time and channel. And the worst is, you have to manually enter the program name! Using a letter grid that you move a cursor around with the remote control! It's awful. I hate it when I record a movie with a long title, but I'm too compulsive to allow myself to abbreviate it.
The remaining major problem is that you can't copy from a DVD to the HD, you can only go in the other direction. I'd think this was a copy protection thing, but you actually can do it if you use a DVD-RAM format disk, just not a DVD-video. So once you back up something from the HD to a DVD, you can't copy it back to re-edit it or burn to a new DVD. I don't know whether the new box will fix this.
Pioneer already did this and has TiVo to boot. DVR-57H DVD Recorder Player with Hard Disc Record and TiVo.
Sure it's only 120 Hours but who really cares? I get 9 hours with a Series 1 TiVo right now and it's fine. I could upgrade it to 130 by replacing the one drive with two big one's but seriously, 9 hours is enough for me.
I don't record movies most of the time. It's just shows that I watch and most of them are an hour.
Frankly just waiting for both the Pioneer and Panasonic devices to drop in cost and I will buy them. But the Pioneer is $1,800.00 for 120 Hours plus you still need to subscribe to TiVo or buy a lifetime connection. I would rather buy a new PowerBook then spend the money on a new TiVo when I am still not exceeding the capacity of the series 1 unit I have now.
Seriously, how many would really record a lot onto DVD just to avoid buying a series on DVD when it's released at the end of a season?
Why rip movies from HBO, etc. to DVD when you could just stream it from Comcast or rent it?
I have friends who rent and rip DVD's using 321 Studio's software. But I tell ya, it's easier for me to rent the iffy movies and buy the ones I care about. I just don't have the time to rip to DVD.
Panasonic Unveil New DVRs (includes photo)
Panasonic Unveils New DVRs
Important additional details I noticed:
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
My friends don't have cable, so I Tivo a run of stuff like Bear and the Big Blue house and dump it to tape for their 1 year old kid. One tape is good for about a month. That's about how long mommy and daddy can handle seeing the same episode about 50 times before they scream at me for new stuff. I think there's probably an underground market for it...
"Yo my man... I can score you some Bob the Builder! It's FRESH!"
With its dual tuners, this would be a great addition to a video surveillance system...
...or a hidden camera operation. ;-)
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
The big question is, can they still be snapped up before Broadcast Flag compatibility becomes mandatory?
You must think in Russian.
>If 'good' is 400GB, I wonder what constitutes 'great?'
A 400 GB model that comes pre-loaded with porn.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
I already have something that ruins my life every 28 days. Why rub salt in my wounds?
No, Honey, really, it was a joke! Sorry! Sorry! Glaahkkk! mmmffffpppt! AIEEEEEEEE>>>
-- Mace only makes me hornier.