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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 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.
1) TV shows are broadcasted frequently in the US, so no need for DVD recording devices
2) Tivo is a recording device that is popular in the US
It seems to me that the "broadcasted frequently" isn't a valid reason for why DVD recording devices aren't popular, because there are recording devices that are popular.
This is just a stupid idea, just like the old TVs combined with VCRs which became obsolete when DVDs came out. It's much better to just buy a standalone TV/monitor, and separate DVD player, TiVo, etc. and connect them together. Otherwise you get a mediocre device which does many things poorly, at a high price.
is we're all a bunch of stealing illegal file downloading copyright infringing pirates.
Just ask the MPAA.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
For us, initially the cost of the hardware and media was too much compared to the good old VCR.
Later, our DVR pretty much made it pointless.
Most recently, the ability to watch TV shows off the internet on-demand, or to obtain them via BitTorrent, has almost supplanted the DVR completely.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
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?
In the US, consumers were stuck with substandard, feature-stripped DVD recorders.
-Media problems
Nothing would work with the next generation of media (I was given as a "gift" a co-worker's old one that takes 1X and nothing but 1X... the "replacement" took nothing but 4X, wouldn't even work with the legacy 1X disks she had left over). Companies like Philips were shit-poor about issuing firmware updates to use current media, instead trying to forced-obsolete their products and force people to shell out $700-800 to replace a 1-2 year old burner.
-Lack of hard drives and smart burning
Not till the 4th generation did they include a hard drive to remove commercials before the data was burned, meaning if you record 2 hours of show you just recorded 40 minutes of wasted space. Trying to archive was a disaster with that going on.
-Lack of ability to access cable
In order to screw people further, cable companies started altering the phase of their signal to work with only proprietary set-top boxes (my ATi All-In-Wonder got screwed by this too, thank you Time Warner and Comcrap for making my purchase worthless). Want a DVR or recording? Better get their one that's built to be able to handle the phase-shifted signals... and is "rented" to you. Digital cable's even worse, because few if any DVD recorders recognize it, making you try to do a set-top box pass-through (same issue if you have satellite) to set the channel or else pray it has codes for its remote-interceptor dongle to do the channel changing work.
Chances of getting a DVD burner unit cable of receiving component video or HD-quality? GOOD LUCK. The market's now been abandoned. If you want to do it, you build your own MythTV box or something.
Why in the world would anyone get a crippled stand-alone DVD recorder? You have to put up with macrovision, and digital tokens preventing recording from DVDs or VHS tapes, and even sometimes digital cable/satellite tuners.
You have to record in real-time, at low quality, and that's if you or an installer can even figure out how to get the wiring right... Most satellite installers can't figure out how to keep a single VCR in the loop, let alone VCR+DVD+DVDR+DVR.
Meanwhile, if you put a TV tuner and DVD-Burner in your computer, you can (trivially) edit out commercials, decide after the fact whether or not it's worth wasting a disc on the show... You can make backup DVD copies at 16X. You can back-up data from your computer. You can record high-def video to disc. etc., etc.
The story here is that Americans aren't stupid enough to buy DRM crippled, expensive, and inherently limited, stand-alone DVD recorders.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
---
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.
Video recorders were always a niche use in the USA. Think back to the VCR days. What was the main use of recorders, other than copying movies to build a movie collection?
Most of it was Video Rental. Playback. It was the only reason most people got VCRs. The fact that the box could also record was unimportant. From a tape perspective, a playback only unit didn't make any sense anyway, the hardware would play or record without any real cost difference.
The few who did know how to program their VCR's used it to record broadcast television. And almost all of that was not archival, it was one-time-use. They'd record it because they wanted to see it later. They didn't want to see it over and over again. Oh, sure, they recorded some things for the kids to watch continously, but really, once you've seen most programs once, that's enough.
Nobody really used consumer VCR's to make archives of video material. Sure, they copied movies and kept them around a while, but eventually a lot of people recorded over even these. Who has stacks of video tapes anymore? Did they move their material to DVD's? Home movies sure, but most of it just got trashed.
DVD Recorders did not take off because of all of these reasons.
a) DVD Recorders cost more than DVD players because of different hardware requirements. And most people wanted them for rental only.
b) Tivo and other hard drive based recorders filled the rest of the niche, because a Tivo is like a big programmable VCR, only you never need to change tapes.
c) The only reason left is archival, and people here simply don't archive video material. They don't really want to create their own long term storage except for their own home made materials. If they do, then they're perfectly willing to buy a high quality copy on DVD that they can keep for a long time.
The market isn't there for DVD Video Recorders simply because it doesn't fit the use cases of people who want to record video as well as other solutions do.
- 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.