I was reading some other posts and it was tell me that the Panny Blu-ray/Freesat/recorder was coming down in price, and I am "keeping a wee eye on it" but I need to know a couple of things and hope someone can help
1. if it can record to blu-ray, can it also record to a normal dvd as with my present dvdr ie SD recording.
2. Can it play "normal" DVDs, as I do not know what type of discs a blu-ray player uses.
2. Will I still need to get an disk put on my wall, or is it "all contained2

I hope someone can help with this.

Bluray recorders are backwards compatible with DVD.

If by disk you mean dish yes you need a dish for it's satellite tuners.

But beware--it still looks like you can't record ITV HD.

You can record ITV HD, just can't copy it to bluray or USB depending on which pvr you use

Sorry, I should have been clearer. That's right, you can record to hard disk, but the expensive blu ray part of the box mentioned by the OP is unusable with ITV HD.

Isn't it? It would be good to have this confirmed or denied by an owner. It's a lot of cash for a half-working faciility. Grahamlthompson: do you have one of these, or can you confirm it from some other source?

I don't have one but there's loads of postings about this on other forums. Currently ITV HD have a drm setting that allows recording to HDD on the Pannies but stops archiving to bluray. Most (but not all) BBC HD can be copied once to a bluray blank.

Panasonic were reported some time ago as being confident that they could persuade ITV to allow copy once of some of there HD transmissions. So far they appear to have failed miserably

Thanks Graham.

I guess it's only going to be worse for Freeview HD viewers. (Hope that's not too much off topic.)

The Blue Ray drive can be used for archiving any recordings, the problem is that copy protected HD recordings may only be archived in downscaled SD 512p format but I believe this can be with lossless compression, so the Blu ray drive is still very helpfull as it can hold many hours of recording.
I am very pleased with Panny in general.

Hopefully that's 576p

Just checking that you were listening

So basically this blu-ray dvd recorder :-

1. can only record from bbcHD (7 hrs of rubbish a day) or ITV HD (one prog every few days) - as it hasn't got hdmi input so you can't connect it to a sky HD box.

2. can't even record itvHD to blu-ray disks which must be it's primary function

No wonder this crock of sh!t is already being heavily discounted.

Joking apart I imagine that if the panny scales as well as my sony bluray that this will give a pretty decent picture on a full HD TV. Makes you wonder if the dvd drive model might be worth a punt. The Foxsat-hdr only lets you record HD stuff externally in crap cvbs quality so that external SD RGB recordings look better than HD ones.

I though BBC HD was set to allow at least one external HD bit copy from the foxsat HDR?

Not that that helps with ITV, and probably not C4 when it materialises :/

Yes it does but it's still encrypted and the only way to play it back is to copy it back to the hdd of the hdr that recorded it in the first place. So all it does is help if you are tight on space on the internal HDD. It takes a long time to copy using usb and requires a linux EXT3 partition on the USB device (Max 4Gb FAT32)

As this thread is about a blu ray recorder, I was thinking of the BBC's statement that at least one blu-ray copy is allowed.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcintern...ection_up.html

Other channels will probably be hobbled. I'd never buy this box if so.