TERAPIN

[Cmonteith]

Thinking about purchacing one of these.

Simply put, can you put in a commercial DVD and burn it to VCD?

What is the process exactly?

Assuminig your DVD player plays VCD's, what can you expect in terms of quality?

[kitty]

You'll need a "video color corrector" to stabilize the "bad" effects of macrovision most likely. Quality will not be as good as a DVD and you might get better quality rolling your own rips on a PC but the convenience factor of just pressing record may outweigh that for you.

[nanz1]

I've had a Terapin for about 4 months and use it all the time. Mostly to backup my dvd collection. It's so easy to use and the quality is not bad at all. I've done a few recordings from my tv's digital box and that has come out great as well. I've also made some vcds from my camcorder and no problem with that either. I love my Terapin!

[TODD]

I have had a Terapin for a little over a week now. My experience:

I typically use bargain basement 80 minute disks, but sometimes it will not go into record standby mode and permit me to start recording. The 74 minute bargain disks do exhibit that problem.

Sync is usually off. It seems to be off from start to finish on a disk, and has shown up on both my cheap disks and on Terapin's CD-R and -RW disks.

Terapin appears to be the only mfgr that add "for consumer" to the label of CD-Rs. I have not found this ID on any other disks at any retailer. This appears to be either a way to sell their own disks, avoid warranty issues ("it's not our fault"), or both.

I had a lot of problems a few nights ago after a long recording session. Several of my disks would not final, and there is nothing I could do (on the Terapin or on my computer) to save the disks. After reading some of the posts on this forum, I directed a small fan at the unit (my AV installation has the Terapin in a small, closed volume with little ventilation). With this fan, the my coaster problem went away. I have not burned a bad one since. I have now added a small fan behind the unit to keep it cool. This REALLY made a difference.

After tweeking the fan installation a bit, last night's RW recording came out completely in sync. This too may be heat related. I just don't know why they did not include a fan. This unit needs it (the disk are hot when they come out!).

One thing that has not been mentioned (that I could find) is that the Terapin cannot record sporting events with anything close to VHS quality. All the crowd detail and movement just overwhelms the bitrate, and it ends up quite pixilated. It is watchable, but is not a replacement for VHS. Don't buy one for sports archiving!

For movies with little camera motion, and most scenes with little scene motion, it is very acceptable. But then there is the sync issue, that ruins it. I hope the fan has solved that. If so, I'll post again.