Digital Video Recorder, Panasonic ShowStopper....

[rhosk]

Does anyone have one of these? Just got one the other day and it rocks! I'm very satisfied with it. You know..."pause live TV"..etc. I'm slowly getting info on how to add HDD's AND to install the drive into PC for video file extraction. Just wondered why it's not really mentioned in here. The digital recording is awesome! Anyway, any feedback would be appreciated.

[rhosk]

Maybe you don't understand what this thing is capable of. 3 qualities to this recorder capturing in real time from ANY source (including 2 "line-in"s---also including 2 line-outs that can be looped back in for edit). When I first received it, was a little disappointed because of the limits it placed on what and when you could record. NOW (with version 3.0 upgrade), you can record anything (not just sked'd programs).

Video Compression - MPEG2
Audio - MPEG1 layer2

Low/Extended Quality:
--Video: 352x480 @ 29.97 fps
--Encoded 2000 kbps, Observed 1900-1950 kbps
--Audio: 32 khz / 96 kbps
(Average VHS quality)


Medium Quality:
--Video: 720x480 @ 29.97 fps
--Encoded 4000 kbps, Observed 3700-3800 kbps
--Audio: 32 khz / 160 kbps
(Excellent quality!)

High Quality:
--Video: 720x480 @ 29.97 fps
--Encoded 8000 kbps, Observed 5600-5800 kbps
--Audio: 32 khz / 224 kbps
(DVD+ quality)

The reason I am inquiring here is because I want to know if anyone has had any luck in transferring these files to a Windows OS via the Hard Drive? I mean obviously, you could hook up s-video for PC capture, but....

This particular unit comes with a 20gig hard drive and I'm also reading you can actually install larger drives.

This solves all problems of capturing digital TV and DVD captures (with macrovision disabled of course). Again, just wondering if anyone has had experience wioth this unit yet. The prices are coming down rapidly!!

[ktnwin]

I have been using a similar product (Tivo).
Yes, the trick is to be able to extract the captured video on the internal hard drive and transfer to another PC so you can burn the MPEG video on CD-R.
For this, it takes a detailed understanding of the file system used by that set top box.
For example Tivo run Linux, stored captured video in MPEG-2 format on the internal hard drive. There is room to add a CD-R in this box. If someone can develop a Linux apps that burns the captured video as SVCD, that's would be great.
What is Tivo waiting for, I am giving an idea here....

[simchippy]

Do a search for underground tivo community, and dealdatabase forms.
Its been going on for a while.