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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."
There was a time for me when this was much different. I used to have a Humax Tivo/DVD-recorder combo unit that let me burn off shows from my Tivo to DVD-R at faster than real time and still watch other stuff while I did it (it burned in the background). But, thanks to the paranoia of the studios/networks/cable-companies and the DRM-laden standards for digital cable and HDTV, there is now no such combo unit made that can take a cablecard or record HD programs (sadly, I had to abandon my old Humax when I got digital cable a while back).
Thanks MPAA, cable companies, and networks!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
In considering getting an HDTV, my wife casually asked about recording shows. Aghast, I had to admit I wasn't sure how that could be done! In the HDMI world - as the cartels intended - there just is no place to plug in a recorder, and DVRs don't come with disc writers. Yeah, I could hack up something involving a PC, HD tuner card, ill-supported software, bittorrent, etc. but it just would never meet the "insert blank, choose channel, hit 'Record'" it-just-works paradigm.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Not at all.
I bought a Daytek HDD recorder from Costco. I plug in cable and power and attach it to my TV. I then set up the recording sequence just like a VCR. It records the shows I want it to. I've noted one exception with a broadcast flag (Aqua Teen Hunger Force, wtf?), but other than that it works almost perfectly. I've currently got about 65 hours recorded that I've got to watch.
It also plays DivX or VixD disks. I got the Torchwood finale off Limewire (stupid CBC shifted it, and only announced it ONCE during the previous show, which we watched off "tape".) and it played with no problems.
I can watch a recorded show or a DVD while it's recording.
I can burn disks off the shows recorded onto the HDD.
I have no idea what or where the original poster bought. Apparently it's crap.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I bought a DVD burner for my PC. I also bought a TV tuner card for my PC. My plan was to watch episodes of Battlestar Galatcia on cable, piped into my PC, record it, edit out the commercials, and then burn it to a DVD to watch later.
Not only did the burning take a long time, but I never got DVDs that reliably played in either of the 2 DVD players we had at the time. They would play for about 2 minutes, then the video would pixellate while the audio kept going for a few minutes, and then it would stop.
After dinking around on the support forums for a while I was told that burning DVDs was a black art, not to burn at the full rated speed of the drive, yadda yadda yadda.
Eventually I gave up. It was easier and much faster to just save the raw video file on a hard drive, and go buy a 500GB hard drive to store all my video on. Now I watch all videos off of my hard drive. Burning to DVD was time consuming, tedious, and unreliable.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
But for example here in Belgium Telenet (a Liberty Global Inc. company) asks money just to let the device schedule recordings with help of the EPG. I'm not kidding. The device is also so unstable that it make's Windows ME look like a very stable product.
Personally I have a HDD recorder but the quality sucks but it's the only way because Telenet locks consumers in. No free choice of hardware but there is always the analog hole.
The explanation that they give is that Hollywood requests it and no other device could "guarantee" that particularly protection and quality. But as every technical person would known this is bullshit because they use standards (nagravision , MHP,DVB-C) but they just won't work together with other manufacturers. They even encrypt public FTA channels !
A better design for DVD recorders would be a hybrid model. You first record the program onto a hard drive. Then the user can set to copy the program from the hard drive to the disc. Higher end models could feature editing and commercial flagging (for manually editing out the commercials) functions. This would make it possible for the user to decide whether or not to save the program to a disc, increases the quality of said copy, and the point to sell to QC is that it would make disc burning errors less likely since the drive doesn't have to burn at real time, and if the burn does fail, you can just pop another disc in and try again without losing what was already recorded.
Umm, I don't know about that. I just got back from being in Israel for 2 weeks and although its not Europe, DVD prices were about the same as the US (price fixing is suspect though). I saw new movies for about 20$ US (80 NIS) if bought from legitimate stores and not bootlegged.
In Japan, one of the territories mentioned in the original post, DVD's are usually around $50 and *up*. So yes, this is a major consideration there.
People in Japan can take their HDD/DVD recorder, record a high-def broadcast of a Hollywood film onto their hard drives, then re-record that onto DVD. In the process, while they obviously won't get an HD-DVD out of it, they'll usually get a DVD that's at least as good in quality as the "official" release. No, it won't have official artwork or a jewel case or anything, but I imagine most people would consider the cost tradeoff worth it.
I guess the moral of the story is DVD recorders are just more *necessary* in certain territories than they are in the US. Most DVD's these days in the US are $10 or less. Even Blu-Ray discs list at $25 and can be found almost everywhere for less than that. And when you add in the free or very cheap DVR's given out by the cable companies, we just really have very little need for DVD recorders here.
Oh, one other thing - the PC is bigger in the US than it is in Japan. If people *really* want to record DVD's in the US, they'll often just do it on PC. That's less common in Japan, where a hell of a lot of people have a cell phone as their only computer, or at most a mini-laptop without an optical drive. (I'm not saying real computers with DVD recorders don't exist, just that there are fewer of them in use than here.)