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Why Americans Don't Buy DVD Recorders
Ant writes "CNET News.com reports on the reasons behind the unpopularity of DVD recorders in the US. The devices, which have seen heavy support in Europe and Asia, fall flat in the United States. The biggest reason is the penetration of Cable television. With cable, the same show can appear on a channel several times. In Europe and Japan, viewers need to grab copies of shows when they can, as it could be some time before the episode is broadcast again. TiVo also took off more rapidly in the States and elsewhere. TiVo is also one of the reasons selling TVs with embedded hard drives in the States remains a challenge."
In Europe and Japan, viewers need to grab copies of shows when they can, as it could be some time before the episode is broadcast again
The author must be watching a different BBC to the one I get.
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
DVD seems like a large medium when you are storing something like old documents, but it really isn't when you are talking video. I mean think: A DVD only holds a few hours of video when you get one for a movie. Even if you are willing to lower the quality, you aren't going to get much more than 6 hours out of a DVD, storing in DVD Video format.
Well thats crap, frankly. That equals lots of switching of discs and having to keep a large library. Better to just keep everything on a hard disk. That way when I want a show, it is right there. You can store a whole lot more, since they are larger, and it is all instant access and rewritable.
Finally, you get better quality with digital cable. I've never seen a DVD recorder that does TV tuning as well. That means the signal needs to be decompressed, sent to the recorder, then recompressed. However with a DVR it is a TV tuner and HD recorder. That means it just tunes in the cable signal, and stores the compressed information on the disk, no recompress.
It is just a technology that isn't that useful, given what else is out there.
They don't show Spongebob Squarepants on Cartoon Network.
What alternate universe are you watching TV in? South Park is only aired like once or twice a day, and it's Nickelodeon that shows Spongebob.
Well, it would all be great, if it actually worked. First, it takes a good 30-45 seconds just to power on, unless you set it to "quick power up", which is basically having it ON but not on (draws something like only 100ma less than full poweron vs ~14ma draw if its completely off). Thats before ANY screen comes up or it allows you to do anything with it. IF you happen to have a DVD in it when you turn it on, it automagically plays the disc. No, theres no menu option to turn off autoplay, and thanks to the feature of not allowing you to skip through an FBI/copyright warning message you cant stop it until it gets to the DVD's main menu, tacking on another minute or so to the boot of the damned thing (pressing stop does nothing but display the red hand indicating you cant do that, and eject wont work either, until fully powered on and not on one of those screens).
Once it finally boots, you have to press the tv/vcr button to actually view its output via the RF inverter (chan3/4), or turn on your stereo to get the picture via RCA jack (unless you have hdmi, which I dont, but that probably has its own issues), UNLESS you had a disc in the drive, then it will have already changed modes for you. Changing channels takes a good 2 seconds each, and if you flip more than one at a time, you risk getting the channel display out of sync with the actual channel its displaying. Also, the channel info display that shows what program is on/next stops working after a couple minutes of use. The longer you leave it on, the slower it gets (memory leak?), and it can take 5+ seconds to respond to a button press on the remote (ie: you push channel up and wait, and a few seconds later it changes. If you push it again while waiting, it changes several channels). It has a tendency to lock up at a black screen while the unit itself displays "U99", which the manual says is "Error, power off/on to reset unit". Which brings up the unit's display itself.... it displays the clock, only while off. When on, it only displays the status of the drive, or an error message, and you cant change it to be informative at all, there is no option to show what channel its on or to have it just display the clock, while watching TV, it always displays "STOP".
So, it has a DVD recorder as well. Well, it would be nice if it ACTUALLY RECORDED A PROGRAM! But thanks to DRM and broadcast flags (in this case, copyright flags of some sort, or just another bug), you schedule a recording, set it up like the manual says (ie: set the shows time, duration, channel and recording quality, put in a blank disc, and power it off), verify that its set right by seeing the red recording indicator thingy, and come back later to find that the scheduled event has passed, but the damn thing didnt do anything. No explination, it just shows up as an event in the past that you can no longer change, and you have a blank DVD still in the drive. WTF. It also claims to play "DivX" encoded movies, but whats funny is the cheapass 4 year old player Im replacing with it could play alot more of the formats than this thing can, and when this one tries to actually play DivX, it over heats and locks up only a quarter through the movie, after starting to drop frames and cause massive pixelation.
I bitched to Panasonic about it, they shipped me a Firmware update disc, which made it respond a bit faster to remote control presses, and reduced the number of lockups, but the thing still locks up, ge
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Admittedly, it's aimed at Cable customers with it's CableCard support. But it will record over-the-air HD channels as well.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
LG LRA-850 - $99.00 just before christmas, so I bought 3.
Easy to use:
- stick blank dvd in (I use rewriteables)
- asks if you want to initialize disk - hit "ok"
- show starts - hit record button
- show's over - hit eject
Wait a minute while it creates the menus and finalizes the disc, and you're done.As a bonus, it also plays divx files just fine.
Kevin Smith on Prince
As an addendum to my previous thought, perhaps this says something about the disposability of American television programming. It's just not worth the plastic to burn it on :P
A while back we bought a $100 DVD Recorder. What a bundle of joy it is.
We don't mind that it doesn't integrate with our satellite receiver, we DO mind that it turns good media into coasters.
On top of that, the timer works only 40% of the time, and navigating the menus requires the ability to translate Engrish.
While VHS 'just works' - You buy a cheap tape, shove it in, and press record. With DVD recorders? You have to check to make sure you got a + or a -, look up the brand to endure you aren't buying coasters, then stick it in, wait a minute for it to initialize (all the while you're missing the show), hit record, then close the disc session which takes two minutes, and hope that it doesn't generate an error in Engrish.
Americans want to record TV onto DVD - but it has to be cheap, easy, and reliable. Recorders are cheap, but the other two components are still sorely lacking.
which was copy my VHS tapes onto a preferred medium. It was well worth the money I spent since I had quite a few old tapes that I had no room to store. I don't record off t.v. because there is little on there that I want to see the first time, much less see again and again. :) It plays DVDs and copies my VHS tapes. I'm happy.
Not only that, he said that the Average Joe American has some trace of intelligence, and he hasn't even lost the customary 1 mod point you lose for having your post's moderation questioned. Plus his name is evilviper. So yes, probably.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
In the states, it's quite common to go to Walmart where for example, you can purchase a Durabrand Progressive Scan DVD player for $21.88. By comparison, here in Norway, after much searching for a good deal online, I managed to find a DVD player made by a company called "United" which I believe is Danish for as little as 399 NOK (or by todays conversion $72.86). The typical price for a newly released DVD such as Pixar's Ratatouille purchased through a discount DVD seller is 179 NOK (or $32.69).
Norwegians (I can't speak for all of Europe, but I can from experience speak on behalf of the Scandinavians) rarely purchase the cheapest unit in the store, in dollars, Norwegians are likely to spend about $150 for a DVD player, therefore the stores don't bother carrying anything much cheaper. But, the cheapest DVD recorders available here cost about $200 instead. For the extra $50 (which is a little more than half the cost of a tank of gas on an economy car), people opt for the DVD recorder.... even if they'll never use it.
Let me also point out that here in Norway, technology propagates substantially faster than in the US. While only emergency workers and yuppies had cell phones in the states, Norway already had a digital GSM network and the typical 14 year old already had a phone. We ditched VHS 5 years before the states (the stores are smaller and DVDs use less space). Kids were carrying laptops around 3-4 years ago, from what I've seen this still isn't the case in the US. Normal people buy cars that get better than 30mpg and I personally have driven a car that gets 50mpg for the past 8 years, and that was the #1 selling car in Europe that year.
DVD recorders are not really that popular here as far as use is concerned. After all, we don't wait for an episode to be played again, we just buy the DVD set when it's released. It's becoming EXTREMELY popular in Norway for even baby boomers to download their TV shows from the states since we typically have to wait an additional 6 months before they're played here.
I think that American publications like C-Net are extremely naive when they assume that the sales of DVD recorders is attached to usage when in reality, it's more closely related to prices. We simply don't get the extremely discounted brands here.