pauldhenry Posted September 10, 2003 Posted September 10, 2003 I am thinking of getting a hdd recorder but want three questions answered first: 1 Given that I have a digital set top box, will the recordings retain the SD quality? 2 What format are the hdds in? Is it some special legacy format or plain old FAT32 or what? I have a DVD burner at work and was thinking of removing the hard drive from the hdd recorder and plugging it in on my work pc to be able to organise recordings onto dvd-r. The firewire feature doesn't really appeal because I'd hate to have to carry the whole unit to work just to copy some data off it. 3 What format are the files?
JasonBB Posted September 10, 2003 Posted September 10, 2003 I have a JVC hard disk recorder hooked up via s-video, I cant see a real difference in quality. I'm not sure what format its actually recorded in though. Best investment I ever made.
chronomagister Posted September 10, 2003 Posted September 10, 2003 Generally you can choose different bitrates to record in, so generally you'll keep the relative 'quality' of SD though it may be more compressed. Eventually most PVR's will have inbuilt tuners (just has been slow take off in Aus.) so you can record digitally. If you're wanting to burn some stuff to DVD you might consider other options. Either a PCI tuner card or one of the newer DVD recorders coming out w/ a HDD. Generally consumer electronics aren't the type of things that are designed to be pulled apart, so don't be suprised if it uses a customised IDE intereface. Everything should encode/compress stuff in MPEG-2 shouldn't it? That in no way means compatibility with other equipment and if you were burning to DVD-/+R I can't imagine it working in a DVD player unless it was re-encoded.
wdino Posted September 11, 2003 Posted September 11, 2003 The format of the HDD for PVRs is nothing like that for your PC. It varies between manufacturers and is usually a quite simple one since the files will be large and relatively few in number. STBs that operate under Linux usually have HDDs that can be viewed on a Linux PC. In all cases that I have seen the digital stream that is recorded and played back is the raw MPEG Transport Stream that comes from the tuner digital decoder. SO it will be identical to the "live" SD picture that is seen from the output of the STB.
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