Ordered the 7250 on Sunday evening from Empire Direct. Despatched yesterday, arrived today - sterling service from ED!

Initial impressions are that is a great machine feature-wise but the firmware is very, very sluggish indeed.

However in terms of setup it just does what it says on the tin, including 5.1 recording and playback. Shame that Philips have crippled this facility so it can't be used in another DVD player, nor a PC, although I'm sure with a little time someone will figure out where Philips have hidden the 5.1 track.

Quality of the video seems superb to me, despite some comments to the contrary elsewhere.

The format it burns (onto an R/W at least) is a little bit painful if you intend to rip it and edit later on a PC - even my favourite VideoRedo can't digest the files the Philips produces, so I've got more work to do on that.

One minor niggle is that the 5.1 recording only works in HQ or SP mode, so if you want to save a film to recordable DVD that's more than 2 hours long, you're going to have to fork out for a dual-layer blank.

The 7250 also solves a real PITA that my old Philips 955 player had, namely that it wouldn't properly output DVDs with a 2 channel MPEG soundtrack over the SPDIF; I either had to manually switch it to PCM in the setup each time, or switch my a/v amp to analogue input. The 7250 on the otherhand just works - all types of DVD track appear correctly through the a/v amp with no trouble whatsoever.

Brilliant Philips - only let down by the performance problem, which I'm hoping will be a firmware fix rather than insufficient processing grunt in the hardware i.e. permanent.

If anyone's interested, I'll add to this thread once I've lived with it a bit longer. Any questions for those considering buying one, just ask!

I'm on my second machine and still can't get the 5.1 recording to work - any hints?!

Clutching at straws, but I presume you've selected the right audio track? When the programme's playing, hit 'setup' then 'toolbar' and you'll find 'audio' as an option.

There should be two audio tracks showing. One is the analogue one and one will be 5.1. Perhaps you have the wrong one selected?

I've had a HDRW720 for quite a while now and have been very happy with it - once you get to know it!

Assuming the 7250 also uses the DVD_VR format, the best software I've found for ripping the files from the DVD_VR format discs is TMPG DVD Author.

TMPG DVD Author reads the discs from the Philips without any problems whatsoever, and as a bonus can author a new DVD with menus, etc., if required. It also extracts the AC3 audio soundtrack from the discs from the HDRW720, so hopefully the 5.1 audio from your machine is contained within this.

Use IFOEDIT to select the aspect ratio of the final DVD-Video by editing the IFO files in the VIDEO_TS folder before final burning.
Last edited by sparky_paul : 05-10-2006 at 13:08

My reading problems just seem to have been a faulty disc. All other attempts are fine. Just to try though, I downloaded TMPG DVD author 2.0 and it definitely doesn't see the DD5.1 track - just the DD2.0.

I've had a look and the Philips sticks the 5.1 track in a non-standard stream type, and even within that although it has the normal AC3 headers, the data is obfuscated in some way.

Not good....

Pity. Looking at the spec, it seems that v2.0 support for 5.1 AC3 is limited to converting it to 2 channel audio anyway, so it wouldn't help you. I use DVD Author 2.0 myself, but I am only working with stereo sources.

I wonder if TMPG Editor 2.0 can help rip the AC3 5.1?

http://tmpgenc.pegasys-inc.com/en/pr...me20_spec.html

From the spec...

Can import and encode/export to 2-channel Dolby Digital audio;
can import 5.1 source files and output to 5.1 if audio is not processed.

To me, it looks like this will extract and preserve the 5.1 AC3 audio, so long as no re-encoding/editing takes place. I would be interesting to see if you could use this to rip the 5.1 from your discs...
Last edited by sparky_paul : 06-10-2006 at 09:59

Doubt it - the 5.1 is not encoded in the standard way, so no tools are going to even see it as an audio track unless they're built specifically for the Philips, which I'm sure none are. Yet

That's me done for... I'm out of ideas now.

Only using stereo audio here, so TMPG has always done the business for me - hope you eventually find something to extract the 5.1.

Thanks anyway sparky_paul - ideas are what counts!

I'll let this forum know if I come across anything that can grok the DD5.1.

Just had another go and still can't get it working - the audio option is greyed out. Definitely 5.1 if I plug the TVDrive optical into the amp. I'm tearing my hair out!

I'll go through the step-by-step process that I do this weekend and pop another post on here for you to compare with your setup.

As you know your 5.1 works coming in, and we know mine works e2e, it's got to be something on your Philips setup.....