I'm looking for a DVD/HD recorder that will automatically record programmes from my Sky (not Sky+) box. I've spotted the Pioneer DVRRT601HS which seems to do this via Guide+. it has the added bonus of being able to transfer from VHS to HD/DVD, which will save on space.

It seems a good spec machine. Has anyone tried one? Has it got any pitfalls?

Thanks in advance.

Herbie

Guide+ is a good idea - list of other supporting models at:

http://www.europe.guideplus.com/En/o...ce/models.html

Cliff

I've just spotted this too -
Anyone seen any reviews of this model or got one?

Hello folks!

I’ve been watching this page for a while to see if anyone knew of a review of this box... and eventually I got one anyway (for Xmas), so I may as well tell you what I’ve found so far. I’m still investigating, so if you have any questions just ask (and I may even know the answer ).

Basically, it’s a nice unit. The guide plus thingy is very useful, though I’ve not learned to trust it fully. It makes setting the timer unbelievably easy, but it is safer to then go into the schedule and edit it, adding a few minutes at the front and back of the times to make sure it doesn’t miss anything -- it’s easy to edit the recording afterwards.

The instruction book is a real treat. It is in English. By which I mean, real, readable, understandable English, which in my experience is practically unheard of. Top marks there!

So far I've only directly recorded to the hard drive, but you can record straight to a DVD too. There are two modes for this, 'video' and 'VR', but I've not been able to figure out the practical difference -- it's to do with how editable the recording is afterwards. I would suspect that for most people, it's simplest to record to the hard drive, edit the stuff and then burn the 'keepers' to disc.

The hard drive is not very big, only 80 gig. It may sound a lot, and they quote up to 200-odd hours, but it all depends on the quality you set for the recording -- the lower the quality the less disc space, of course. I have found that the second-from-top setting (‘SP’, equivalent to 2 hours on a 4.7gig disc) looks (to me) indistinguishable from the original digital broadcast, and the next one down, ‘LP’, is fine for programmes you don’t want to keep. The picture for settings below that, however, get mushier, and though I’ve not tried them yet I suspect that they are fairly pointless. There’s a vast array of permutations on the quality settings you can access if you want to, but again for most normal folks I’d think they are pointless.

So in practice the hard disc is good for 80 or so hours... but I failed to fill it over Christmas, so it’s enough for most people.

One oddity I’ve found, from the few recordings I’ve backed up, is that the picture quality seems to drop a little between the hard disc version and the DVD copy. I’ve no idea why this should be -- they’re digital, after all -- but maybe it’s a fact of life with all such machines, not this one in particular. It is why the better quality settings are best for recordings you want to keep.

The ‘disc navigator’ button / function is brilliant and simple. It brings up a set (four or eight, four’s the default) of thumbnails of the recordings -- moving ones with sound -- so you can see at a glance which one you’re after. From there you can erase a recording, edit a name for it (which copies across to a DVD when you burn it), edit bits out (eg at the beginning and end, the adverts, etc), divide it and rearrange segments.

You can put in chapter points too; however these do not get copied to a DVD... perhaps if you record to the disc directly or record in the editable mode, you can do it on the disc. Not vital, but I’m not sure why you’d bother to put chapters into something you’re not keeping, and it’s best not to keep things on the hard drive (in the same way as one should back up a computer).

Naming the ‘tracks’ is useful if a bit time-consuming, picking a letter at a time from the alphanumeric chart. But if you record using the guide plus, these are entered for you, which is very handy.

The jpeg viewer function is phenomenal. I’ve tried viewing jpeg discs on a few players now, and you usually get long enough to make a cup of tea between each picture coming up. Not with this machine -- the most you’ll suffer is the image arriving in maybe a half-second, top to bottom like on a loading web page, and most are instantaneous. It means that you really can show your photos on the telly.

Discs can be burned pretty quickly, depending on the quality setting you’ve used and, crucially, the species of disc you’ve chosen. I was unaware that there’s a load of different versions, and some -- like the DVD-RWs I got from Argos -- are the bottom variety, and will only burn at 1x speed, ie in real time. Hence I’ve not investigated the burning side of things much yet! Obviously that’s not a problem with the machine, but something to watch out for if, like I was, you’re new to the whole digital recording lark.

The machine has a load of simplifying ‘one touch’ buttons and settings, for transferring from VHS to hard disc or DVD. It has a range of inputs and outputs that seem to cover just about all the options. And to record a programme? One button, and off it goes more or less instantly.

One down side: it is yet another bloody remote to keep track of . OTOH, it is the simplest and most logically laid out handset I’ve encountered. It looks pretty scary when you see it at first, but the buttons break down into three blocks for the sorts of things you might want to do. It’s the first handset I do not have to stare at for a few minutes to find the right one.

So, off the top of my head, that’s it. Excellent machine, saves space and scart leads, very simple to operate, and quality seems fine. Seems well built, and unlike some other players, the disc tray doesn’t have to think about it for a minute when you tell it to open. VHS playback seems fine... though after playing with the hard disc you’ll really notice how crappy VHS is when you go back to it. You can of course record to VHS as well, though apparently no timer recordings, but quite frankly I don’t know why anyone would bother when you could use the hard disc or DVD-RWs. So regard the fact that it’s got a built-in VHS as a space-saver and an obsolescent feature for transferring recordings to disc.

Oh, and it does not play DVD+Rs, but that's quite normal.

Hope that helps.

Simon

Oh, and just to add that I got mine from Peter Tyson: www.petertyson.co.uk/pioneerdvrrt601.shtml
who were not only cheapest, but also provided absolutely first rate service (I ordered it on Friday, got a phone call Saturday AM to say it was out of stock, but Pioneer should be delivering on Monday or Tuesday and they'd get it out to me as soon as they received it, and did I still want it? Got another call on Tuesday to say it was in, they arranged a different delivery address (to my Dad) no problem, and it arrived Wednesday morning. Superb, can't recommend them highly enough.

And no, I do not work for them .

Thanks very much for all that, I've not managed to find any other reviews on the internet. I have a few questions though...

If you have it on a quality setting that will allow 2 hours of video to be burned onto a DVD, but the program you want to watch it 2 hours 5 minutes long, can you reduce the quality a little bit, without having to go down an entire quality setting?

Also, with GUIDE+, is it like having Sky+? You can watch one channel while recording another? Or do you have to be watching the channel you're recording?

Thanks for the information, and thanks for the great and informative review.

I’ll have to look into that to be sure, but I think you can. It's all to do with the size of the file the recording creates, of course, so it may be that the odd five minutes would fit onto 4.7 gig anyway... a disc holds 4.7 gig, which may or may not be exactly two hours, and probably isn't. It's all to do with bitrates and other such things that are beyond me .

Note too that it'll record onto dual layer discs, which (though they’re a lot more expensive, about £3.75 + each as far as I can tell) would solve most problems -- apart from copying a movie DVD (which none of us would do anyway, would we? ), it'd be more a problem of what else to put on the disc... unless you're recording Wagner's entire Ring Cycle from BBC4 at high-quality or something!

There are a bunch of standard quality settings, and a large range of others which you can fiddle with. I've not looked into those yet. Certainly at the time of recording you can vary these, perhaps keeping the picture quality but reducing the sound a notch, for instance.

From the few discs I've burned from the HDD so far, though, the quality settings at the burning stage seem limited to the standard ones, or else where you change them is well hidden. But, one of the options is -- I forget the term but it means -- fast copy. I think this transfers the recording as it comes, straight onto the disc if it'll fit. It seems daft to be able to subtly vary the hard disc recording quality and not copy it like that, so I expect you can, and that may be how to do it: dozens of options at the HDD recording stage, and for DVD, the 'straight across' mode or else the standard settings.

So, at worst, if you know you're recording something that'll make a file just a bit too big, you could change the setting at the start. And like I say, you may be able to change it at the burning stage too. I'll get back to you on that one.

(If only I’d bought some faster (faster than ‘real time’ ) RWs, I’d have played with it more, but real time recording experiments are too damned slow just to test out! For comparison, on the 'fast burn' (or whatever it's called) setting, an 8x DVD-R will burn two hours of material and finalise in about 8 minutes flat. Something to watch out for if you want to use RW discs... but then, maybe one would normally use those more like a VHS cassette, and record straight onto them anyway.)

I have Freeview.

Sort of 'no', with an element of 'yes' .

To do that properly, the machine needs to be able to make sense of a signal, whether analogue or digital. At least with my Freeview setup, this machine is just like a VHS recorder. That is, you can record from any of the analogue stations (just pick 1-5 as in the old days), or from the AV digibox input, which is effectively another single channel. So it will record 1, 2, 3 etc, or whatever station the digibox is tuned to.

So, while you cannot watch one digital channel while recording another (since there’s only one source for the digital TV information, the box sitting on the telly), you can record digital and turn your TV to any of the analogue five, or record an analogue channel and turn your TV to its AV input to watch a digital station coming from the digibox.

I imagine it'd be the same with a satellite or cable decoder: you’re limited by what your decoder can do, as it’s the source of the info the recorder receives. If it can give your telly one signal and your recorder a different one, you’re in business, but that’s beyond my experience .

The way round it -- which I suppose will become a necessity eventually, when the analogue transmitters get switched off -- would be to get a second digibox and a bunch of extra cabling. Some machines have built-in digital Freeview decoders, but I haven’t spotted many at the cheaper end of the market, and certainly not with VHS as well. (As of last month when I looked, there seemed to only be a few machines available at all that have VHS too, and this Pioneer was a good hundred quid cheaper than the next cheapest.)

On the plus side, the machine comes with a thing I think they called a G-link cable. It's a wire with a plug on one end and on the other, a little black bit (about 3cm long) that looks like the bulb thingy in the front of a remote control. It looks like that, because that's exactly what it is.

You plug the plug in the socket (oddly enough ) at the back of the machine, and run the lead so the bulb thing sits in front of your decoder's IR receiver (where it 'sees' the signal from your remote). Mine runs up over the top of the telly and sits just sticking out in front of the Freeview box, held in place by the box's weight.

It seems a bit 'Heath Robinson', but it's actually jolly neat, because what it does is change your digibox's channel for you. So you set the recorder to record that film at 2.30am (by just selecting it from the Guide + listing and pressing the red button), turn it off but (I think) leave the digital box on (it may even turn it on for you but I've not risked it yet), and it'll come on, switch channel on the box and record it. No need to faddle with the box's own timer, if it even has one.

If it were any simpler, it'd watch the programme for you and tell you whether it's worth bothering to watch back. Maybe this is nothing that unusual or clever, but it certainly impressed this technologically challenged bloke.


One more thing, an update on recording quality. As I said, it has a bunch of standard settings: XP (approx 1 hr on a 4.7gig DVD), S(tandard)P (2hrs), L(ong)P (4hrs), E(xtended)P (8hrs), and some even lower. SP is excellent, LP a tiny bit soft but would still be useful.

Well I watched back a bit of a programme recorded at EP last night, and the picture is very soft. Watchable, but with definite digital muck, a pic quality worse, I'd say, than LP VHS. Now, given that the recording contains a quarter the information per second that SP does, this is inevitable, but if the EP setting is crappy, it means that the even-lower settings would be, I expect, almost unwatchable, maybe down to pre-digital Channel 5 levels. Forget them, and just copy off onto disc before your hard drive gets too full.

Oh, and the machine kindly tells you if you've got less than five hours hard disc space left (at your current recording setting), which is nice. Effectively like 'your recording credit is running low, please arrange a back-up' .

No problems. I’ll look into the recording quality subtleties asap. Sorry if I seem to be highlighting the negatives. The bottom line, though, is that this thing is great. Simple, effective and space-saving.

Hope that helps!

Thanks for the further info

I believe the dual layer DVDs are around twice the size of the standard single layer disks, are they not, and hence can fit twice the amount of programming on the disc at a certain quality setting?

How did you find the VHS to DVD/HDD to transfer by the way? Was there any loss in quality (or even maybe a slight improvement)? This is the main reason for me getting this particular model, as I have around 130 cassette tapes that need converting to DVD

No problem; more below!


Yes, though I've yet to find any 'dash' format ones in the shops, only seen them online. They hold 8.5Gb, so nearly 1 gig smaller than two separate single layer ones, but still, very useful. There's even RW versions, I gather, but it seems it's still early days for DL dash discs. Doubtless they'll become more available and cheaper.

Superb. You just tell the machine where you're copying from and to (can record straight to a DVD if you want, too), and off it goes. Once it's saved the video to the hard disc (which they call the HDD), you can edit it same as with something recorded from the telly. Very simple and efficient.

So you are aware, and don't let these put you off... the only mild annoyances are:

There's no timer stop setting for VHS-disc copying... unless I've missed it . You get a display on the screen that lets you stop the recording manually, but if you want to record only part of a VHS, and maybe go out leaving it going, it will keep recording till the tape stops. Not a real problem (unless your HDD is getting full), as you can simply divide the file and delete the remainder (and you'll probably be editing it anyway), but just a little silly that you can't tell it to stop after, say, an hour, like you can when it's recording from the TV signal.

More seriously -- or not, depending on what you want to record and how and when -- there is the 'real time' recording factor. 'Real time' is at the speed of watching, so a one hour programme takes an hour to record. When you record to a DVD at any setting except ‘high speed’ (so an 8x disc will finish in about 8 minutes), it does so in real time. And this ties up the TV (or seems to unless, again, I’ve not figured out the way round it), because it sends to the TV the picture it’s working on. So while it's at it, you can only watch the analogue channels via your set's own decoder, or the thing you're recording.

And 'real time only' happens when you're transferring from VHS to HDD (obviously, since a tape can only play at viewing speed -- if you played it at speeded up, the signal to the recorder would be speeded up ). But (potentially) worse, 'real time' has to be used if you want to record a high-quality setting HDD recording to DVD at a lower setting to fit more on. So if you want to record four hours of S(tandard)P onto a normal two-hour disc, you can do it on the LP setting... but it'll take the programme's four hours.

The way round it, of course, is to set it going before going to work or to bed.

On the plus side, there is another smashing to-DVD recording setting called 'optimised', where it does its best to maintain the quality while filling the disc. So if your programme is 2 hours 30 long, record it to a 2-hour / 4.7Gb disc on optimised, and it will only drop the quality enough to make a 4.7gig file. So the result will be better quality than if you just went for the next step down LP / 4-hour setting, with 1 ½ hours of wasted space. Very very useful... other than 'optimised' recordings, like the other non-'high-speed' settings, being done in real time.

In short, if you want to whack out a DVD in ten minutes, you can, but stick to not messing with the recording quality... so maybe bear in mind what you want to do with the recording before you press 'record'. If you want to alter file sizes at the point of burning a disc (presumably why it can’t be done on high speed), do it when your TV won’t be needed. So it is only a problem for those who cannot forward-plan... like me...

Also, I said previously about chapter points not getting copied across to a DVD. I lied. Well, sort of.

Chapter marks -- which you can edit in on the HDD file -- are indeed copied... but only when you burn on high speed. Presumably they would get lost during the file resizing. On the other hand, you can tell it to put chapter points into a real-time burned recording at regular -- iirc, 5, 10 or 15 minute -- intervals. They won't therefore be at the ad breaks or start of scenes, but at least they're there. Beyond that sort of thing, I guess it's better to put the recording onto an RW disc and take it to your computer for proper video editing.

But back to from-VHS recording...

No loss of quality that I can see. Presumably the HDD gets the same quality of signal that the machine can send to the TV, so what you see on VHS playback is as good as the recording will be.

The main improvement is that, unlike VHS, a paused (or fast-forwarded etc) picture is totally stable and clear, as you'd expect. I've not compared the two signals, but should think that the old garbage-in-garbage-out principle is relevant: the recorder wouldn't be able to improve on the information it has to start with. Still, it's nice to have digital-grade pause and fast-whatever, and as I say the quality does not appear to drop, at least.

Heh, tell me about it! My wife is sick of the boxes full in the spare room... and none too pleased that the stack of tapes beside the TV is gradually being replaced with a stack of burned DVDs .

Don't forget, too, that DVD recording is time-consuming in other ways. You’ll want to label up your discs, right? No more peeling sticky labels with crossings out, or post-it notes on boxes once you’ve gone digital! Especially for write-once recordings for keeping, and especially since you can do it all so much nicer these days...

So you then find yourself sitting at the computer knocking up inserts for the CD- or DVD-sized boxes. Printing, possibly guillotining up if you don’t want to splash out on pre-perforated glossy sheets (if you can find them), inserting... and so it goes on.



I'd say that for the price, this machine is marvellous. It is, above all, very simple to use and does everything I can imagine ordinary users might want. The tape transferring is a joy, and there's even a one-touch VHS-HDD record button I've not even needed to investigate as the more complex way is so simple. I've no idea, either, how many of my niggles would be present on more expensive machines too. Doubtless you get what you pay for, and a thousand-quid machine would be better. But actually, I neither know nor care. This is excellent.

Enough of a recommendation?

I think that's it, but do ask if you've got any other questions.

It's all great, thanks so much!


That is something I really wanted from a DVD recorder. I am obsessed with quality, and I'd return it if it didn't have this function.

But nevermind. I bought the thing this morning!!! Can't wait to get it though the post!

Simon
Thank you very much for all of the information you wrote here, I found it all very helpful.

Regards TPH