Do They Have Cable TV In Heaven?

I was driving past the gas station today and the one sign said "Regular Unleaded $264.9" and the sign next to it said "Cigarettes $2.59 pk". Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it strange that heart and lung disease now costs less in California than a gallon of gas. Seemed strange to me, and the next time someone comes up to me and says "life is cheap" I can tell them "No you're wrong. Death is actually a nickel cheaper."

Being the financially prudent type myself, I chewed on this awhile and came to the conclusion that budgetarily speaking it wouldn't be such a bad idea to sell my car and start smoking cigarettes. After all, a penny saved is a penny earned you know, but then events which have been so prominent in the news lately made that plan seem less worthy - or should I say stupid. So rather than surrender to my prudent, rational self I decided to give in to my more spendthrift, irrational self and go out and buy a new DVD player instead. Granted, this has no express relationship to either cigarettes or the price of gasoline, but does show that a person has to break the mold every now and then and doing something foolish, if only to avoid being ambushed by the corruptive influences of too much good sense.

So, I took this uncashed gift card I got last christmas and went down to the local electronics superstore, fiercely determined that come hell or high water I was going to be rid of it and find something to spend it on. The computer stuff didn't interest me, nor did the cameras and telephones and movies, etc..., but I did have this 6 or 7 year old DVD player at home and figured I could use something newer that would play movies and mp3's and jpeg's and all those formats that were hopelessly beyond my old antique. And while I was at it, I figured, why not get one of those new ones that can record DVD's as well as play them. That way I could back up some of those movies and TV shows I had on my TIVO and put them away for safekeeping.

And so I walked into the store with a gift card and walked out with a new DVD player/recorder.

That's what I'm going to blog on tonight - my new Toshiba D-VR4SU Hi-Fi VCR & DVD Video Recorder. First let me say there were cheaper recorders available and some well under the $200.00 I paid out of pocket after cashing in my gift card, but I've always had good luck with Toshiba in the past and so that's the one I got. Anyways, who cares why I bought this particular model - let me just pass on my experiences to others who might be considering buying one for themselves.

My experiences:

Let me begin by saying it works just fine, and by that I don't mean it worked fine the first time I tried to use it, only that after some trial and error I finally figured out how to get the thing set up and working the way I want it to. The unit ships with a remote, some batteries, an RCA cable and a coaxial cable for those still getting their TV over an antenna. The unit also has connections for S-Video, Component Video and Digital Audio (both coax and optical), but cables for those connections are not included. As an added bonus they also bundle in some extra packing paper in the form of something jokingly referred to as the "Owners Manual". My advice is that after unpacking the unit, immediately throw the "Owners Manual" in the nearest trashcan. I guarantee this will save you hours of confusion and frustration.

Being the naive type, I didn't throw away the manual and after following the instructions for hooking up my satellite box (or cable box as referred to in the manual - same difference), I happily spent the next hour or so checking cables, connections and settings and trying to figure out why I wasn't getting any picture. The manual kept saying to tune the tuner on the DVD recorder to channels 3 and 4 and you should be able to see your TV signal, but all I was getting was a big, blue, empty screen full of nothing. Finally I started playing around with all the settings and drilling down through all the setup menus and discovered a spot on the DVD tuner called "Line Input". I changed the channel to Line Input and presto - I finally got my picture. I then went back through the manual and I swear to you "Line Input" is not mentioned anywhere. Typical, I guess.

So now I had the picture coming from my TIVO piped through my DVD Recorder and it was time to burn a disc. This was remarkably easy and anyone who has ever taped anything with a VCR would have no problems with it. In fact, it's exactly the same with both one-touch recording and timer recording available. Just put a blank DVD-R or DVD-RW in the machine, start the recording and that's it. I should mention that this model will also record to DVD-RAM but since most DVD players and computers can't read DVD-RAM discs I don't know why you would want to use it. Still, it's available.

After the recording is done the last step is to "close" or "finalize" the disk. This is only necessary if you want to take the recorded DVD and play it in some other machine. I'm guessing you probably do, so you will need to enter a setup menu, drill down a couple of levels and tell the machine to "finalize" the disc. Once this is done you have yourself a nice little DVD that you can st0re away or give to a friend or whatever.

At least that's the theory.

In actual use there can be problems. The one I ran into on the my first burn attempt was this thing called "title editing". I don't want to go into great detail here but let me just summarize and say that before finalizing the disc you have the option of editing the titles of the videos contained on the disc. By default the machine names them by date and time (I think), but if you want to give the videos a more descriptive names you can. This seemed pretty cool to me so after my first burn I tried changing the title to the name of the TV show I recorded. It went smoothly enough but after I finalized the disc and tried to play it on my computer it spit it right back in my face with an "unrecognized format" error. This was not what I expected and when I explored the disc I found that VOB file containing the actual video played just fine, but the VOB containing the title was hopelessly mangled. Moral of the story - don't mess with title editing unless you've got some spare blanks and feel like experimenting. I just leave the titles alone and have had nothing but clean burns since. The DVD's play on all of my computers and on my housemate's DVD player as well.

The only other problem I've had with the DVD portion of this unit is that it gets confused a lot between the different types of discs I throw at it. In fact the "C104 - Disc cannot be recognized" error is pretty common and it usually takes more than one process of opening and closing the DVD tray to get it to correctly identify the disc, whether it is a commerical DVD, a DVD-R, a DVD-RW, and so on. Sometimes even opening and closing the tray doesn't work and I've had to shut off the unit completely and restart it before it would recognize the disc. It's very annoying, but once the disc is recognized I've never had any problems playing or recording.

The VCR portion of the machine works as expected and it's nice being able to replace both DVD player and VCR with just one machine. Like most combo VCR/DVD Recorder units the Toshiba can also dub from Tape to DVD and vice-versa, but I haven't actually dubbed a tape yet so I can't comment on that. I can tell you that it won't dub commercial VHS tapes to DVD though, because I did try that and it didn't work. The tape I tried to dub is an old Cranberries Concert video that has apparently been Macrovisioned, and when I tried to dub it the machine immediately stopped and gave me a "CR254 - Naughty, naughty, naughty" error, or something like that. It's unfortunate, but understandable. Just forget about dubbing anything copy protected and you should be fine for everything else.

So that's my little Toshiba D-VR4SU consumer review. The manual stinks but the machine works as advertised. It records DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD-RAM and VHS tapes, and plays DVD's, VHS tapes, CD's, CD-R's, CD-RW's, VCD's, and SVCD's. Iit's nice being able to move stuff off of my TIVO and onto DVD where I can put it in permanent storage or manipulate it into other formats, and although there are some minor problems with the unit, overall I'm pretty pleased.

Of course there are other methods available for recording video and I've considered them, but having a dedicated DVD Recorder works if you don't have a computer in your living room or don't want to run a bunch of cables back and forth. A hard drive inside the unit would be nice but s0 far the hard drive DVD Recorder's are over my budget. Besides, I have a TIVO so a hard drive would be a little redundant.

Anyways, the prices are coming down and people looking to replace their DVD players might want to consider getting a recorder. I know I heard the horror stories when they first came out but they seem to be getting the bugs worked out, and even though Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are coming these current Recorders are still inexpensive enough to be a good interim solution.