PVR 721/ DVD writer

[BobFly]

Do you think it will be ever possible to be able to hook-up the 721 to a dvd writer to burn the shows you have recorded? E* isn't very good good with software updates...very slow! I do think the 721 is great never not have a pvr again!

[Kagato]

I had Tivo back when it first came out (Up until Rev 3) and I have to say the 721 is on par, if not a little better, than Tivo in the early days.

I doubt we'll ever see it. The tech docs on the broadcom chipset suggests that the encrypt/decrypt happens in hardware. Although it's only DES, and could be done in software, you'd end up putting the keys at risk. Now, if you had a firewire port you could keep it all in hardware and sell a firewire DVD-R drive...

[dbronstein]

Why can't you just hook up the output of the 721 to a DVD burner? Yes, it's analog, but that should still work.

Dennis

[Jacob S]

How about to a dvd burner on a computer? Can one hook up the tv to the computer to burn anything it displays?

[gcutler]

Originally posted by Jacob S
How about to a dvd burner on a computer? Can one hook up the tv to the computer to burn anything it displays?

Yes, there are USB and Firewire External devices and High End Video Cards that will take Analog Video and Audio and translate it into Digital Video that can be burned to a DVD. The outcome is very good I have done it with my 508. Best option would be to take it directly off the hard drive of the PVR and convert it to DVD standard and burn but that is what the TV/Movie Studios are afraid of and it will never happen via "Legal" means, there may be "underground" ways to do stuff but that usually takes a while.

[Kagato]

The biggest problem I see with the Analog conversion is the same problem I had with the Set Top Box Tivo paired with the Dish STB. It's almost impossible to get really good quality. Dish is already cutting quality to the absolute minium. Even with when choosing "Best" quality it still horrible with all sorts of MPEG artifacts. I should preface this by saying I am watching on a 92" projection HD TV. If you had a 27" TV you'd be pressed to really notice it.

Stiill, think of it this way, at each conversion you lose a little signal quality. So, you have the original Analog feed to Dish. That gets converted to a digital signal. MPEG compressed and beamed to the subscribers. The MPEG gets Converted to Analog, that goes into your DVD recording System. Analog is converted back to Digital. Then the digital signal is MPEG compressed again. That's burned to DVD. Then to play it you decompress the MPEG and convert it back to Analog. That's 6 conversions.

I'm looking forward to the 921 because of it's firewire output.

[Scott Greczkowski]

While the 921 will indeed have a firewire output, it will not be called a firewire port. I will only work with Echostar approved devices.

[Kagato]

Originally posted by Scott Greczkowski
I will only work with Echostar approved devices.

:) Funny.

I'll be irked if E* doesn't update when HD-DVD/Blu-Ray hits the scene. I'm assuming they are going to require some 5C loving. Although if a device is 5C complient I'm not shedding a tear if someone hex edits a vendor ID in a firmware update to make it work.

[TomCat]

Originally posted by Kagato
The biggest problem I see with the Analog conversion is the same problem I had with the Set Top Box Tivo paired with the Dish STB. It's almost impossible to get really good quality....I am watching on a 92" projection HD TV. If you had a 27" TV you'd be pressed to really notice it.

Stiill, think of it this way, at each conversion you lose a little signal quality....

You make some fine points. It is always preferable to avoid as many A-to-D and D-To-A conversions as is practical, because you do indeed lose something each time. But, if you begin with good quality material and use high quality converters, you will be hard pressed to see the difference even after a number of conversions. One poor conversion can degrade the end product much worse than a dozen good conversions.

The single strongest reason I abandoned my stand alone Tivo and Replays is due to the fact that the PQ of the bit-bucket recorders such as the 721 and 501 and supposedly the DTivo is noticeably better (although many still call me crazy claiming they can see no difference). I saw so MUCH difference that I retired all 3 of my standalones.

Since the files are stored digitally on all PVR's it is tempting to find a way to archive them to another medium without using an analog conversion, but the industry is dead set against making this easy to do, because they are under much pressure from the creators of the content, which is one of the factors that put Sonic Blue into receivership. That's not to say it can't be done, although it is so difficult and one must jump through so many hoops that it becomes less than practical.

I have found that using the analog out of my 721 or 501 into a Panasonic DVD recorder (which like most consumer machines is designed NOT to accept digital inputs) I can get quality that is nearly indistinguishable from the original PVR playback. Even using the second-to-best recording speed yields quality that is still significantly better than the raw output of a standalone PVR ( but that means only 2 hours per DVD). Using the LP mode gives about the same quality as that same raw output.

So, we have to ask ourselves, "what is the real goal here?" Is it to get the best possible quality that can be reproduced within the realm of practicality, or is it to strive for a pure digital copy, even if the first solution might even yield better results? Frustrating as it might be to not be able to digitally archive these digital files without reorting to analog, that actually turns out to be the best solution at hand.

[Hopper27]

It isn't the analog to digital conversion that is a problem.

It is the fact that you are RECOMPRESSING video that is already compressed to a reasonably high level.

Something compressed twice tends to look horrible, unless you just give it so much datarate the second time that you're hardly compressing it, but that somewhat defeats the point.

It is a kludge, and it is absurd that digitally extracting the video isn't allowed.

Jason

[scooper]

Go tell it to Hollywood and other producers of content...

If you can convince them that NO ONE will be taking their content and distributing it via the internet, you MIGHT have a chance. Until then, the analog connections work pretty well.

[Hopper27]

Originally posted by scooper
Go tell it to Hollywood and other producers of content...

If you can convince them that NO ONE will be taking their content and distributing it via the internet, you MIGHT have a chance. Until then, the analog connections work pretty well.
Yes, analog works just fine, that is NOT the problem...

The problem is decompressing and recompressing the datastream.

If the content could be copied directly to DVD-R disks, it would take up 1/3 less space for the same quality if you can avoid that extra recompression step.

Jason

[Jacob S]

Since the DVD-R has not been out as long to the public as VCR's have it is to be expected that ther eare not as many conversions available at this time that are as easy to do as conventional recording. It is just a matter of time when people get to figuring things out.

[johnsbin]

I have been recording sitcom episodes to my Philips DVD+RW Recorder with the SVideo output from my 721 in 2 or 2.5 hour mode and the quality is more than acceptable on my 32" TV.

[Tomjoben]

All I want is the ability to archive data from the PVR off to a CD-R or DVD-R. I'm sure they could put it in a protected format that can only be played back through the PVR receiver. I don't care if I have to reconnect it to the PVR to watch the content. The biggest weakness of Dish PVR's in my opinion is the limited disk space and NO way to expand the capacity. This give the users the ability to archive shows without Hollywood having to worry about people mass-producing DVD's for friends and neighbors.

[Hopper27]

Originally posted by johnsbin
I have been recording sitcom episodes to my Philips DVD+RW Recorder with the SVideo output from my 721 in 2 or 2.5 hour mode and the quality is more than acceptable on my 32" TV.
Ok, good for you...

But that method wastes storage space on the DVD-RW, it takes up time and energy, and most of all, is pointless.

The video is already in MPEG 2 format, it is already ready to be moved to DVD-RW. You how have to sit there and spend 30 minutes without intruption to offload the video, when it should take about 5 minutes to copy the raw data file.

During that 30 minutes, you can't touch the remote, watch something else, or have the receiver have any problems (like a audio hickup while a background timer fires)

It is an absurd and pointless waste of time and effort.

Jason

[Kagato]

On the other hand, there's pretty much no reason why it couldn't support USB 2.0 HD units to add storage. In fact I had been told by Advanced Tech Support that it had been tested out, and worked. It opens a can of supportability worms, but I think there's something to be said about being able to add space just by plugging a module in.

[TomCat]

Originally posted by Hopper27
...that method wastes storage space on the DVD-RW, it takes up time and energy, and most of all, is pointless....it should take about 5 minutes to copy the raw data file...It is an absurd and pointless waste of time and effort.

Jason

Absurd, yes. Pointless? Hardly. It gets the job done.

I'm not happy either about the fact that it is not practical to archive digitally as some have described. Since it is technically possible and shouldn't be that difficult and we all want it, it would be nice if someone provided this path for us. But they haven't and they probably won't in the current political climate, making trying to currently achieve this a TRUE "absurd and pointless waste of time and effort."

What IS practical, is to live in the world that actually exists, where there are archival options that work well. Recompressing or converting data is not so much of a problem as has been described in this thread, and the results are supremely acceptable, even to those of us who make our livings based on quality control of video content and see studio-quality digital video on $9,000 professional monitors 40 hours every week.

If we could do this digitally life would be that much sweeter, but then if Aunt Alice had a mustache she could be Uncle Al, too.

Either continue to rail against the injustice or accept it and move on. Many of us have found a very acceptable solution in analog archival from PVR to DVD.

[Jacob S]

Can one use the dvd recorder to burn the shows onto a dvd-rw and then burn over it over and over just like you would a hard drive? I know you can a show that you are recording delayed like you can the hard drive, and the cd-rw can allow you to use it over and over, so the only difference I could see is that you would not have as much time available on the disk to view shows like you would a hard drive, although the dishplayers only had 5 hours on the 7100 and 10 hours on the 7200.

This, I believe, should be the future of data storage and playback, it would be just like a PVR only you can save it on disks when done and remove it. That would be the ultimate machine.