I got my PVR9200T a few weeks ago, mainly because of the USB socket for archiving.
After much faffing about, here is a guide to burning a transferred recording to a standard DVD so that you can tape the footie and give it to your father-in-law

This guide uses only free tools, doesn't involve any transcoding and takes the shortest time of all the tools I tried (including commercial ones) - hurray !


(1) Transfer the recording to your PC using a USB cable and the Humax software provided. I won't go into details here, only that you should get about 2 hours worth of programmes onto a standard 4.7GB DVD.

(2) Your transferred file will be called something.ts. For the purposes of this guide, we will call it footie.ts. You need to demux this - the tool I used was ProjectX - a Java application which can be had from http://sourceforge.net/projects/project-x
Click file->add and find footie.ts
Then click the Quickstart button, select "Demux" on the "action" line and then click the big green play button.
Once this process is complete, close ProjectX.

(3) Make a new folder, say, C:\TEMP\VIDEO_TS. Where the new folder is located doesn't matter - except that it should be on a drive with plenty of space - but the new folder must be called VIDEO_TS

(4) You then need to build VOB files and create a DVD image - for this we will use IFOEDIT from http://www.afterdawn.com/software/vi...ls/ifoedit.cfm
Open IFOEdit and select DVDAuthor->author new DVD
Click the square button next to "Video" and find footie.m2v
Click the square button next to "Audio" and find footie.mp2
Click the square button next to "Destination" and navigate to C:\TEMP\VIDEO_TS
Then click OK

(4) After the process is complete, click the Disc Image button . Click the square button and navigate to c:\temp. Enter a name for the image, say footie.img , click ok and then click the "create image" button.

(5) We have now created a DVD disc image and the final stage is to burn it to DVD using imgburn from here http://www.imgburn.com/
select mode->write then click the "browse for a file" button , just to the right of where it says "please select a file".
Find footie.img and click OK.
Make sure that your DVD writer drive is selected under "Destination" and then click the big "Write" button at the bottom.



That's it.

Hope that this saves some of you from 2 days of experimentation and frustration

If you find ProjectX unfriendly, you can also use MPEG Streamclip at step 2 to demux the ts file to m2v and mpa.

Do people actually do this?

My god that looks complicated. Just buy a cheap DVD Recorder and burn to it in real-time using Scart. It's not ideal that you're transcoding but the quality difference isn't huge, certainly not to go through that rigmarole.

p.s - Thanks for the guide btw I don't want to sound rude.

Simon - thanks for the tip. ProjectX does look overwhelming, but thankfully I only need it for a 2 click process.


bradavon - it's not as much of a rigmarole as it appears in type

Why spend two hours recording onto DVD in realtime (without starting or ending any new recordings on the Hummy) when you can transfer from the Hummy, edit, author, and burn to DVD in about 45mins? Besides, the 2 hours of recordings that scuzzphut mentions is only really valid for recordings off the BBC channels. Recordings on most other channels will usually let you get at least 2.5 hours of video on a single-sided DVD. (I was getting 6 x 45 min episodes of The West Wing on a single-sided DVD without any 'shrinking'! OK, the picture quality is definitely less than you would expect from a commercial DVD, but it's still the same quality that it was broadcast at.)

I used to use PVA Strumento to clean up and de-mux the .ts file before editing it in Mpeg2Schnitt (and then later in TMPGenc's Mpeg editor) and then author in either Ulead's VideoStudio 8/9. Now I just transfer from the Hummy, edit & tidy up in VideoRedo, and then author either in VideoRedo or TMPGenc's DVD Author 3. Neither VideoRedo nor TmpGenc DVD Author is free, but the basic VideoRedo (that doesn't author) is pretty cheap, very quick, and very easy to use AND gives frame accurate editing without losing lip-sync which most of the free utils didn't when I first started do this kind of stuff.

However you do it, it's still quite satisfying when you pop one of your own disks into the DVD player and up pops your recording!

Fair enough then thanks guys.

It does seem like a lot of steps you have to be there to do even if the start to end time is much less. As to "without starting or ending any new recordings on the Hummy" I leave it going over night so am asleep anyway but point taken.

It's definitely great we have the choice, unlike most PVRs.

The point being that as the PVR is on (playing), there will be a banner pop up to announce any timer recordings starting, said banner will be recorded onto the DVD.

Do you mean the Play info banner? That only appears for a split second and if you start recording before the program starts it appears in "empty space" anyway.

As I record to a HDD/DVDR I erase that before burning to a DVDR anyway but point taken.

No I mean a banner to announce that a timer is about to activate.
"Start recording by reservation (hh:mm-hh:mm)"
It is only there briefly, but it does show on the TV whilst playing back a previously recorded programme.

I haven't tested whether it shows on the VCR scart output, but as we've had the question "my Humax remote no longer controls the volume or switches the TV AV in, why?" which is normally they've connected the TV to the Humax VCR scart, and not noticed, I assume all the on-screen displays are the same to all the Humax video outputs.