Here's a small help from me as I got help from your topics... I got me used Philips DVD Recorder in order to digitize my old VHS and VHS-C tapes. Recorder had non working DVD drive, I found out latter motor for moving head was busted. So I opened it, and as it is plain 3.5" IDE connection for both - DVD R drive and HDD - I connected IDE DVD+R drive from one of my old PCs and it worked flawlessly. Original Philips replacement drive is about 100$ if you can still found one (D5.2 Closed) so it doesn't make any sense. I will try to find a bit shorter PC drive in future, strip off front panel and put it into Philips DVDR.

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After fully functional DVD+R drive in it, I connected VCR via SCART and started to digitize tapes, after some experimenting and understanding, I burn DVD+R with videos, finalize it on PC and extract files via DVD Ripper software, recode it into MP4 via HandBrake and voila. PC will read DVD RW (which in my case, all were old and full of errors... ) and DVD+R, when finalized. Open DVD+Rs will make problems (in my case), using IsoBuster is not making sense as it is costly. So I just burn DVD+Rs and as a matter of fact, I will totaly make 10 of them for my tapes as digital archive and also on my discs and cloud as MP4.