First the Pat On The Back Part...

I finally took the plunge and bought a DVD recorder - an LG DR165W, with the famous LSI chipset. I must admit I did not have high hopes that I would find the image quality good enough for VHS archiving but I am very impressed with the video quality at the SP setting - I have not tried putting VHS into it yet though. The recording looks the same as the source, sharp edges, no visible compression artifacts or mosquito noise on a 42" Panasonic plasma.

Provided the video is good enough I hope I can stop using computer capture and encoding, and edit the MPEG2 on the computer, as I am archiving home videos - of which I have way to many!

Now For The Brick Bats

The problem is that I have many DVD's of home movies with menues created in DVD LAB. All these disks navigate properly on every DVD player they have been used on EXCEPT the LG DVD DR165W. I am confident that DVD LAB is not the problem because I have - on occasion - produced DVD masters for schools and I have not yet had a report of a problem like this on hundreds of DVD players - ranging from the old to the new.


On the LG DVD DR165W the menues navigate properly when the disk is first inserted, but one finds that after a video clip is selected and played that upon returning to the main menu the navigation keys no longer work and the cursor is stuck on the videoclip that was previously played! All you can do is eject the disk, reload, and then select the next clip - very annoying!

I have contacted LG but I have not had a helpful response yet. I am betting the problem is firmware related, but I do not know if LG updates DVD recorder firmware.

Any comments, ideas, suggestons.....

Really a shame as it is a nice machine....