Pioneer 5100 - cannot copy optimised titles from DVD to HDD

[Board Room]

Ive just tried to copy some optimised titles from a VR mode RW disc to the HDD but found that they wont copy.

Has anyone else had this problem?

Is it because...
the titles were optimised?
its a VR mode disc?
the disc is unfinalised?

Originally I had four titles on the HDD, recorded in SP mode, that in total were just over 2½ hours. I wanted to fit them all onto one disc so I used the "optimise" mode to copy to DVD. I used a VR mode RW disc.

Now I want to copy the optimised titles from the DVD back to HDD so that I can make several copies at high speed but I cant get them to copy!!

The same thing happens with another disc too (same scenario just different titles), so I doubt its a disc fault.

I haven't had any problems before copying titles in either direction - at high speed or reducing from Fine/SP to LP/EP.

This is the first time Ive tried to copy an optimised title back to the HDD and discovered this problem.

Any ideas?

Thanks for any info.

BR

[Frobozz]

I've thoroughly checked the manual and optimizing should not have any effect on copying from a VR disk to the hard drive. It also is not because it is a VR disk or that it is not finalized.

Some things to check:
You need to have the space available on the hard drive for the copied videos.
The videos cannot be copy-once protected. You can see if yours are copy-once protected by playing the DVD and pressing the display button twice. The upper right corner of copy-once protected videos have an excalmation mark "!". Obviously, the DVR knows the video has been copied once so maybe it added this mark.

Something else to try is using One Touch Copy to copy individual titles back to the hard drive. You'll want the hard drive's recording speed set at the same rate as the video on the DVD.

But everything I've checked shows that you should be able to add the titles from the DVD to the copy list and have them copied back to the hard drive.

[Board Room]

Hi Frobozz

Thanks for replying.

Ah yes...I've just realised that I left out a significant piece of info...sorry...

Its HIGH SPEED copying of the optimised titles that I cant do.

I can copy them in real time at Fine/SP/LP/EP but then of course I lose the optimised compression which reverses the whole point of optimising them in the first place - i.e. to be able to fit 4 x 40minute titles on to one disc with minimal loss.

I need to find out if its possible to copy them and retain the same level of (optimised) compression. Is there a way to find out what level of compression they were optimised at?

There is more than enough free space on the HDD to take the titles.

Thanks for the tip re copy-once protected. I'll check that out. Cant do it now cos I'm in the middle of recording to a Disc.

Cheers

B R

[Frobozz]

The Pioneer manual says that High-Speed Copy from DVD to HDD is only available if the video was originally recorded to the VR-formatted disc. Because your video was copied to the VR DVD the High-Speed option is not available.

In the future you should copy to a Video-formatted DVD-RW instead of a VR formatted disc if you think you'll be wanting to later make more copies. A finalized Video mode DVD-RW works with the DVD backup feature that copies the DVD to the HDD, which becomes the source for copying it back to more DVDs. That copying is done at High Speed.

As for figuring out the optimized setting for copying back at the same rate, activate your Manual Recording option. You do this via the Initial Setup menu; choose recording; turn manual recording on. This adds another recorder setting call MN. MN has 32 possible settings and each one shows how much video will fit on a DVD. Your optimized video is most likely to be the MN setting that comes closest to nearly filling the DVD with the total amount of minutes for all your titles on the VR DVD. Choose that setting for copying the video back to the HDD.

I hope this makes sense. Also, my experience is with the DVR-510H which I understand to be very similar to your 5100. However, I don't know for certain that my suggestions may apply only to my model.