Analogue DVR - Keep or throw away?

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Sideface

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#1644872 3-Oct-2016 19:01

Rikkitic:

Eww, throwaway society!

Some technologies deserve to be thrown away.

Remember cathode ray television sets?

Great room heaters but ...

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Kiwiuk

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#1644873 3-Oct-2016 19:01

Rule #1 of The Men's Club - everything must be kept "just in case"

Rule #2 of The Men's Club - nothing is sacrosanct if SWMBO decrees otherwise

gzt

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#1644948 3-Oct-2016 22:03

Format is not enough but any kind of open source or free secure erase will be. Then you need to find something to put the drive in to run the command, and that's the pita. Probably IDE.

colinuu

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#1644966 3-Oct-2016 23:26

I have a couple of VHS VTR's. Not been touched in probably 15 years. Probably time to bin them...

Rikkitic

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#1645130 4-Oct-2016 11:12

I thought our VHS recorder was no longer useful for anything, but then it turned out to be essential for interfacing with the DVR when I needed to transfer some home movies and other stuff to DVD. I didn't use it for playing anything, just passing the signal through. You never know.

We also still use our old DVR with Sky. We don't care about higher resolution (plenty of that from other sources) and are resisting efforts to upgrade us to the new Sky box. With the DVR, which also upscales to 1080p, we can record anything without silly restrictions and do whatever we like with it, including archiving the video file or even putting it onto DVD. This convenience triumphs over slightly better video quality.

Plesse igmore amd axxept applogies in adbance fir anu typos

old3eyes

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#1645139 4-Oct-2016 11:23

I have an old analog Panasonic DVR and DVD player / recorder. I'm keeping mine just in case someone gives me a VHS tape to put on a DVD.

Regards,

Old3eyes

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RustyViewer

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#1645426 4-Oct-2016 20:09

I have been using my Pioneer analogue recorder to record National Radio in stereo by plugging in a Freeview receiver, Sunday Nights with Grant Walker. FM is only in mono.

fe31nz

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#1645498 4-Oct-2016 22:46

Rikkitic:

I thought our VHS recorder was no longer useful for anything, but then it turned out to be essential for interfacing with the DVR when I needed to transfer some home movies and other stuff to DVD. I didn't use it for playing anything, just passing the signal through. You never know.

We also still use our old DVR with Sky. We don't care about higher resolution (plenty of that from other sources) and are resisting efforts to upgrade us to the new Sky box. With the DVR, which also upscales to 1080p, we can record anything without silly restrictions and do whatever we like with it, including archiving the video file or even putting it onto DVD. This convenience triumphs over slightly better video quality.

You can only resist Sky updating your box for so long. As soon as Sky has finished updating all the boxes, they are going to start transmitting channels in H.264 instead of MPEG2, and the old boxes will stop working as they can not decode H.264. So you will need to work out how you will be able to do Sky with the new decoder fairly soon. The best quality option is to not use the decoder at all, just use the card that comes with it to decrypt the channels and record using DVB-S2 tuners in a PC.

Rikkitic

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#1645528 5-Oct-2016 00:02

Good suggestion. We may try something like that but I am hoping to use this as an excuse to dump Sky altogether. I just have to convince the one who pays for it.

Plesse igmore amd axxept applogies in adbance fir anu typos

illicit

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#1645899 5-Oct-2016 13:32

Keep the Pioneer HDD Recorders for music storage/playback - they have quite good inbuilt music management and CD ripping

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