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Sony Launches DVD-Burning Appliance
what_the_frell writes "News.com.com has a story about Sony's latest DVD Burner that can be connected directly to your VCR or Camcorder to directly record or back up your recoded home movies, TV shows, etc. It can also be hooked up to a PC via a USB 2.0 connection as well. The article reports that the device effectively removes the PC from the equation, giving users an easier way to make their own DVDs. No word yet if it will record straight from your television, or from your DVD Player to circumvent copy-protection. *wink*" Sony also has its own press release on the gadget.
This just seems like a natural progression for me... Standalone CD burners -> standalone DVD burners.
No word yet if it will record straight from your television, or from your DVD Player to circumvent copy-protection. *wink*
Software that manages copyright ownership (or any other software for that matter) doesn't require a PC to be ran. I'd guess that Sony, which has large interests in the motion picture and music industries, has some kind of copy protection with this - with or without a PC.
With SOny being one of the largest movie producers in the world and way up there too in the music bizz, I doubt they will bypass ANY copy protection. In fact I would expect it to be built into the device too.
Contrary to popular belive DVD's and AOL CD's, etc. make lousy coasters as they don't absorb moisture. Maybe glue them to your car and make it look like big carp, yeah ...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The main use for this will probably be mastering home tapes and camcorder family stuff onto optic media which is less prone to loss over the years.
OTOH it says it can be hooked up to a PC, I wonder how long before someone zaps the PROM to allow copy of any DVD.
But, still, the price tag makes it an unlikely choice for your occasional piracy trip. This is a family appliance rather than a geek thing, obviously if you wanted to dupe DVD's you'd be buying one of these.
Broken Hearts are for Assholes. - Frank Zappa
It's actually a pretty cool little device. Say I wanted to record something in order to edit it, either from tv, or anything putting out a video signal, like a game console. Instead of having to wire it to a vcr, or complex wiring into the computer, I just hook up the output to this, burn to a dvd, and I've got it to play with anywhere else. Not bad. Obviously, it'll still detect macrovision and not allow regular DVD movies to be copied, but it does seem to eliminate the need all those 'Dazzle' video capture devices that they sell at Best Buy and the like.
The best part is dual layer and PC connections, everything else is already available for $200 at costco and you get TV tuner included. I believe amazon had a DVD recorder with TV tuner for $169 just a few days ago. The costco model (don't remember the brand, its some weird Chinese brand) includes firewire input, so you can plug your DV / Digital 8 cam right into it. Not bad for that kind of money.
Because it doesn't really matter. What kind of device do you know if that can put out 400+ Mbs?? Certainly not any DVD burner. People like to argue about USB 2 vs Firewire until they're blue in the face but there's no storage device that can possibly obtain those speeds in the first place.
"No word yet if it will record straight from your television, or from your DVD Player to circumvent copy-protection. *wink*"
And Slashdotters have the audacity to wonder why DRM schemes, RIAA/MPAA legal lobbying and lawsuits are being built and deployed in the home retail markets in various countries. You're fools to yourselves.
There is a large market for people who like stand-alone gadgets but aren't interested in learning software and having to use the computer to do everything. It's definitely not the "geek" mentality, but a lot of people see the computer as a very complicated addition to the process, and would rather buy something that skips that step.
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
they either sell the movies [they own the rights to LOTS and LOTS of movies, new and old and yet to be made.] or if you to rip the movie while you rent it or have a download in the right format, they will sell you the recorder...they make the bucks at one end or the other...that's the Sony solution to the whole copywrong battle.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Hmm. Lets think about this a minute. If the standalone burner burns +R discs - would it be reasonable to beleive that it can also play them?
I only own one VCR and it can record AND play tapes.
You'd still have to buy the video capture hardware, and then you'd probably not be able to transcode and burn in real time, you'd have to have the know-how to prevent it from stuttering as it burned and you'd have to have the know-how to make it playable on a standard DVD player.
So depending on output quality, it may be cheaper, faster, and easier although certainly not as flexible. Yeah, you can probably find a cheap capture card, but how's the quality on that?
Sony... the guys who brought us very expensive DVD players that wouldn't read CD-R/DVD-R media.
Sony, the guys who brought us the Sony Memory Stick and Magic Gate copy protection aka "Slow and Lame."
Sony, the guys who just released the "iPOD Killer" that can't even play MP3's before converting them to Sony's proprietary format.
Sony, the guys who make TV's that enforce macrovision so strictly that they sometimes don't work with DVD players and legal DVDs.
Unless they've turned over a new leaf, this thing will be crippled. I quit buying Sony years ago because of their anti-consumer stance.
There have been many standalone DVD burners on the market now for years. I got one more than a year ago and it even had a harddrive in it as well for recording. Plus my pioneer TiVo has a burner in it as well.
Good to see that slashdot is keeping up with the tech industry.. Only a few years behind now...
There's also the fact that some of us don't watch tv, read books, listen to music and sleep in the same room as the computer.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Firewire can be usefully faster, for example with an external hard disk; all the benchmarks I've seen show Firewire performance to be superior to USB2 while using less CPU resources (and certainly this is the case with my own external Maxtor, connected to my desktop). The point is, USB 2 *doesn't* do 480Mbs for any sustained period, it is in fact well below 400Mbs and you can see a difference with 'normal' devices. (A 16x DVD is over 22MB/s, e.g. over 175Mb/s.)
:-(
It would be particularly peculiar, however, for Sony to launch something that did USB2 and *not* Firewire, as Sony are a major Firewire supporter - it has been impossible to buy a Sony Vaio without it for the last five years at least, while they have only added USB2 to their laptops relatively recently (typing this now on a Vaio with firewire but no USB2
Annoyingly Sony use the 4-pin no power connector, and have the gall in their more recent laptops to situate a proprietary Sony DC output right beside the 4-pin firewire when they could just go with the standard 6-pin...
No geek should be excited about this.
Amen brother. I would not buy a standalone DVD recorder that does not support firewire input (or i-Link as Sony insists on calling it).
So other than double-layer support, what makes this so ground-breaking over this one that they all ready produced (and has firewire)?
I get the impression that the MPAA is highly opposed to firewire on recording devices. I see fewer and fewer devices with this feature. Heck, I'd be willing to settle for input only as a compromise.
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