Pioneer DVR-531H-S Questions

[kenw]

I picked up one of these recently with the intention of using to mainly burn DVDs of TV series I have recorded on my cable company's DVR. The picture quality normally is pretty good, the picture quality when playing from the DVR is good also. My problem is that I get a lot of pixelation, ghosting and what I believe are called macro blocks. I knew before purchasing this unit that picture quality coming from it was kinda soft. I didn't expect this bad of a picture though, especially considering all the screencaps I saw from it and all the discussion about it in these forums. I've tried recording in XP and SP. I have the video settings on LDP, haven't messed with the custom settings since I really don't know what I'm doing there.

Does anybody have any suggestions on what I might be doing wrong? Is this simply a problem with recording things from network TV? Any help would be appreciated.

[gshelley61]

Analog TV (broadcast or cable) is generally noisy (grainy), and usually has edge ghosting and other artifacts. Digital cable and satellite can be loaded with with streaming compression artifacts like macroblocks sometimes. Are you sure the problems you are describing are not in the source already?

[trhouse]

Try recording to a atandard vhs VCR. If the macroblocks, etc. are still there, then they are in the source. Analog VCR's do not produce blocks.

[kenw]

I do see the minor effects you're talking about with normal viewing, but there is a very noticeable difference between watching the shows live or off the DVR and watching them after copying them to the 531 HDD.

[trhouse]

Are you recording to DVR and then recording to the 531? That results in two encodes with a loss in quality. Have you tried recording directly with the 531 without the DVR?

[kenw]

Yup, recording to DVR first and then to 531, I'll set it up to record to 531 for next week. I realized I'd be going through multiple encodings with what I was doing but didn't realize there would be this much degradation in quality.

[trhouse]

I have cable but no DVR so I am not certain how much degradation you are suffering doing two encodes. I would remove as many items as possible in the chain if for no other reason, so we can say they are not contributing to the issue at hand.

[kenw]

Well, haven't been able to try this out yet since I can't seem to get it to pick up the program listings. It seems to be doing what its supposed to when turned off, scrolling through channels on my digital cable box and all, but when I try to bring up the listings on the 531 the page is still empty. I had actually started this process just for the heck of it before my OP in this thread and its well past the time the manual says it will take to get a full listing. Anybody with this machine have an issue like this that they were able to solve?

[sync]

I suspect that the EPG only works with analog cable not digital.

[kenw]

After searching around the web I see a few others having a problem with this but their issues seem a little different from mine in that they get no communication between thier 531 and their cable box. Guess I'm just lucky.

[FulciLives]

My understanding is that most cable TV DVR boxes record the digital stream exactly bit-for-bit so if you record a digital channel to the DVR then play it back later (to record it to the Pioneer) you should not be loosing any quality.

This is only for digital channels and of course not all cable channels are digital. Analog channels should be recorded directly to the Pioneer.

Also not all cable TV DVR boxes work like this ???

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[kenw]

FulciLives, you're right. I'm getting very little, if any, quality loss recording to and playing back from the DVR. The problem occurs when recording from the DVR to the DVD-R so that I can edit out commercials.

Well, nothing I've been able to do has gotten the chanel listings for the 531. Since I'm not home at the time to manually record the shows I want, I'll have to record to the DVR then burn to DVD-RW so that I can clip out the commercials on my computer. I looked through guides on DVD authoring but found lots of older articles, articles that didn't seem to be what I need and nothing called "An easy piece of software to use to edit out commercials on a computer For Dummies". Can anybody recommend such a piece of software?

Can anybody offer an opinion as to whether, taking into consideration the picture quality degredation resulting from all this copying to DVD-RW and such, I'd be better off just taking the quality loss I have now going from DVR to DVD-R?

edit: It seems the Edit articles are what I'm looking for, I'll go through those instead now.

[FulciLives]

I edit with MPEG-VCR

Another popular MPEG editor is VideoRedo

I have never had a problem with MPEG-VCR but some seem to think that VideoRedo is better

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

P.S.
I have my cable split and have one going to the DVR box and one direct to the Pioneer. This way I can record analog channels directly to the Pioneer and digital channels to the DVR ... which I then play back to the Pioneer ... sometimes straight to a DVD-RW but othertimes to the HDD on the Pioneer first ... then to a DVD-RW.