Panasonic DMR-E20 questions

[PhoneMatt]

I have inherited an E-20 from a friend, mainly to use for transferring my Laserdiscs to DVD. So far it has worked really well. I do have a few questions, though. Is there any way to set the machine to FR mode without using the timer? How far over 2 hours can I go in the SP mode before I run out of disc space? (I know that video tapes have a few extra minutes on them, do blank DVD's? I have a few movies that are 2 hours and 7 minutes and would like to transfer them in the best possible quality. The blanks are Maxell -R's.)

[handyguy]

Nope, 2 hrs is 2 hrs on a dvd recorder. did you try a LP mode, which is 4 hours?

[samijubal]

The discs will hold over 2 hours, but unfortunately Panasonic decided to stop their recorders at 2 hours for some reason. You can use flexible recording though. Just set a timer, have the laserdisc on pause so that the recorder gets a signal and when it starts to record start the laserdisc.

[PhoneMatt]

Thanks for your answers, guys. I haven't tried 4 hour mode because I am trying to get the best picture I can. A lot of these discs haven't been released on DVD, and probably won't be. I thought about setting the timer and recording that way, but, in timer mode, the Pause function doesn't work. I would have to edit out the disc flips and the dark screen while I changed tha discs. I was hoping for something easier, but it looks like I'll be editing my dvd's and reburning.

[Anonymous65]

Don't know about the DMR-20, but the DMR-50 has a button hidden under the cover on the remote that is called FR where you specify for how long you want to record and then hit OK and it starts recording for this duration and fills up the disk.

[louthewiz]

The E-20 can only record with FR in the timer mode.

[samijubal]

RAM discs will hold around 2 hours 9 minutes in SP if formatted right. If I formatted the discs on the E-20 they would stop at 2 hours and I could look at the disc and see that it didn't record all the way to the edge, but if I formatted the discs on the E-10 and recorded on the E-20 it would get around 2 hours 9 minutes and I could see that the entire disc was used.

[PhoneMatt]

That's interesting. I have some DVD-Ram's but haven't tried them. From what I've read on here, going from DVD-Ram to DVD-R is not the easiest thing to do. I'm not a stone-cold noob, but, I'm no expert either. I'll probably use the "fool-it-with-the-timer" trick and re-edit the discs, then burn.
Thanks for your help.

[samijubal]

TMPGEnc works great for RAM to DVD-R. It takes awhile though since ram discs take about 20-25 minutes to read. I don't know how you would get the RAM discs formatted to record 2 hours 9 minutes though. I bought a few that were formatted like that, almost all of them are formatted for a computer. I had to do them on the E-10 to get the extra 9 minutes. The weird thing is they only go 2 hours on the E-10 no matter what they are formatted on, but the E-20 would get an extra 9 minutes if the discs were formatted on the E-10.