DVD or video?

albertross_2

setting it in stone

phatbear

moxie wrote:

Please tell me what finalizing the disk means!

Its the dvd verison of putting a full stop at the end of the recording. If you havent finalised a disc then it wont run on a dvd player etc.

all the best

the bear

AMO

moxie wrote:

I have Sky and record certain programmes (Lost!) onto video for my daughter, who doesn't have Sky. However my video machine is old and has now stopped working. So I need to replace it as cheaply as possible. I already have a dvd player. My question is can I record from Sky onto dvd if I buy a dvd recorder (she has a dvd player)?

It depends. I just recently bought this for my folks:
http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/115715
Basically, they're old and they're familiar with how tapes work.
However, in the last year or so, video tape recorders have past their cheapest price and are going up slightly because of a lack of demand.

I bought the above one because it combines a VHS with a digital receiver and so enables my folks to watch digital channels as well.

You could also consider a DVD combined with a VHS player, but they're fairly expensive still.

Personally, I haven't gone for DVD recorders because on their own, they're not as flexible as ones with hard drives, and the ones with hard drives are fairly expensive and I'm waiting for them to go down in price.

Sky Plus comes with a hard drive, but I'm not willing to pay £10 / month for that service.

Overall, for me, I still use a VHS which is fine. Just set Sky programs to Autoview and Series Link and then set the VHS to match and you've got a fairly cheap combo.

2007 will be a good year to buy a good value DVD Recorder with hard drive though.

AMO

moxie_2

phatbear wrote:

Its the dvd verison of putting a full stop at the end of the recording. If you havent finalised a disc then it wont run on a dvd player etc.

all the best

the bear

So I assume that's easy to do once I get my new dvd recorder. Will it be in the manual?

Avoriaz

moxie wrote:

So I assume that's easy to do once I get my new dvd recorder. Will it be in the manual?

Hopefully the manual will be clear. Can you read Chinese and Korean?:D

Be warned that there can be incompatibility between DVD players and recorded disks. There are different standards, DVD +, DVD - and DVD Ram, plus R for record once and RW for rewriteable. Also some theoretically compatible machines might not play some types of disks recorded on other machines. Frankly it is all rather hit or miss and I can’t really advise further. You will probably be OK, especially if you both have the same type of player.

Finalising a disk is the process of telling the DVD player that you have finished writing data to a disk so it can complete the Table of Contents and add the codes that “theoretically” allow the disk to be replayed on any machine. With a VHS tape player you just insert the tape and the machine reads whatever is on the tape. With a DVD disk, and also a CD disk, a player needs to read the TOC so it knows what is recorded and can display the menu and knows where to go to play each track etc. That is a fairly simplistic and maybe not quite precise definition but is probably all you want to know.

Jeannine

You don't need to finalise the disk if you're going to watch it on the same machine, only to view on a different one. And it's very easy to do - on mine, the on-screen menu tells you how, and it only takes a minute. On my machine I can use -RW disks which means I can record on them lots of times (as you can with +RW). Just read the manual!