On 27/07/2010 22:08, Tinkerer wrote:
"Dave Plowman wrote in message
...
In ,
Jules wrote:
On Mon, 26 Jul 2010 18:34:38 +0100, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
I had the impression that the hard disks are less-than-trivial to
remove/ swap, and (obviously) they only have a limited amount of
storage space - in other words, good for temporary "watch it a little
bit later" storage, but not really analogous to what people used VCRs
for.

Would depend on how many VCR tapes you had. The basic 250GB HD holds
IIRC something like 200 hours worth of programmes.

That's not too bad ... certainly more than I'd expected!

However, you can link it to your PC and transfer stuff there for
storage if you prefer.

Aha, now that is useful! I'd figured that the manufacturers were
probably leaned on by movie and TV companies and didn't allow people to
do stuff like that, so you got stuck with a self-contained box and had
to start binning stuff when space ran out.

You can, of course, transfer individual recordings to DVD or even VHS if
you want. What it won't do is record *from* VHS, etc. Off air only.
Although there are similar devices which can.



My Panasonic with HDD and DVD burner happily records from "most" VHS tapes.
It is not supposed to record from the purchased movie type because of the
anti-piracy signal but in practice it only falls over with Disney ones.

Which is a shame for us. We collected a hell of a lot of Disney tapes
from our local video rental store, most of which have never been
released into the public domain.

Also my daughter transfers recorded films from her Sky Plus box to VHS tape
and I then transfer them to DVD for her, just connect the SCART out on the
VHS to an AVI connection on the HDD/DVD recorder and away it goes. You can
even use the pause control on the recorder to edit out adverts etc.

Earlier this year I transferred a large amount of VHS to DVD just this
way. My only failure was Good night Mr Thom. The DVD has to be cleaned
with IPA before it will play right through. But I have found the
original tape, I just need a case to put it in now, so it will play in
the video recorder.

Dave