egafd.com

A topic, I know aired here before - but things change all the time.

Can anybody tell me:

1. Whether DVD recorders or any of them have the equivalent of the old video "flying erase head" (I think it was called) for editing - I don't mean for professional editing - just to get an exact join between recordings and

2. Any machines better than others for copying off your old VHS to DVD - do any of (or even all) of those machines with both VHS and DVD slots copy from VHS to DVD

Any recommendations on both counts appreciated

TIA

Rock

Get one with a hard disk. Makes editing much easier. Mine just involves palying the vhs through the co-ax cable therough the dvd recorder and pressing the red button.

can these be used like a video tape? by which i mean a reusable rw disc you can use again and again?

Choose a Recorder that lets you manually set the recording time to make best use of the 4.7GB DVD capacity.
My Pioneer has 32 steps from 60 min to 6 hour.
Machines vary but my Pioneer in Video Mode does up to 2h 20m at 720x576 then drops to 352x576. In VR mode which allows more fancy in-machine editing it switches at 2hr.
Hence I try to keep in 2hr 20min limit but to be fair starting from VHS generally hard to see any losses at 3 hour setting.

Also remember a commercial dual layer DVD can hold well over 8GB but AFAIK (as far as I know) there are no domestic dual layer DVD recorders yet.

If you want to use the DVD recorder only definately go for a hard drive model.
However if your PC is fairly new adding a DVD recorder drive is better value and many latest models are dual layer although only +R dual layer discs readily available now.

I purely used DVD recorder to record to an RW then use PC to edit, add chapters and titles then author and burn final DVD.
I use TMPGenc DVD author to create then NERO 6 to burn.
Yes more time consuming but worth the effort for anything you want to keep/view longterm.

Also the VHS player is important as a tape that plays back fine on TV can have jumps/glitches once copied to DVD. If your tapes are not A1 always worth trying a couple of VCR's for best result with each tape and tweaking tracking too. Again time consuming but worthwhile if you want the best result.

As to RW's theoretically supposed to be good for 1000 rewrites but in reality you are likely to scrach them far sooner. Now decent -RW are only a quid if you get 100 cycles thats 1p a cycle!!!

Hope that is useful plus interested to find out other peoples experiences too.

thank you darlin'

i have a daewoo df-4150p

it has one touch, dvd to video & video to dvd [+r] - and is easy to use

with dvd+rw, it works like a vcr.

its easy to use, and has editing facilities.

and only ?199.95