dave wrote:
On 28/07/2010 09:29, Mark wrote:
On Tue, 27 Jul 2010 23:19:20 +0100,
wrote:

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.

Google "macrovision removal".


Thanks for that, it is going to take me some time to go through it
though. Got the g daughters to look after for the next 3 weeks. First
week on my own while wife goes to Scout camp.

Dave

Most units sold for copying from tape to computer will happily copy
videos or DVDs while ignoring the Macrovision or similar. I've got a
Roxio USB one which works fine and before that I had a Pinnacle Dazzle
(DV-170 IIRC), but that particular model won't work under Windows 7 -
which is unfortunately what is on the PC in the living room and hence
near the TV.

SteveW

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