Panasonic DMR-ES10S review

[jackedup]

Yes you are correct. The video was recorded from satellite years ago on a Sharp VCR in EP mode. It was simply one of the VHS tapes I was transferring to DVD and the transfer was done on a DMRE20 Panasonic DVD recorder on a RAM disk. The capture was done with PowerDVD from the RAM disk.

What did you mean by 16-235 look?

[spectroelectro]

Smurf is probably a little too vehement about his dislike of Panasonic DVD recorders but I understand where he's coming from. Aside from the fudged out blurry macroblocked picture of the Pansonic, which can be seen in the screen capture BTW as though someone ran a VirtualDub smoothing filter over it at an excessive setting, the 2 main gripes I have about the Panasonic are its penchant for churning out DVDs that will play but won't copy or read properly, and the Panasonic's chronic problem with generating ac3 streams.

Right now I've got 6 DVDs from a friend, made on a Pansonic, that won't read properly or copy. I ran Smartripper all last night and it took 8 hours to rip title set from one of those Panny DVDs because there were so many errors. One title set. 8 hours! Finally gave up and just asked the guy to send me new DVDs. This is an ongoing serious problem with the Panasonic. It tends to spit out discs that will play but won't copy or rip. Not every disc, mind you, but every 10 or 20 discs or whatever. I just don't get that problem with other DVD recorders, certainly not from the JVC.

The other major issue involves the Panasonic's known defective encoding of ac3. This is no myth. If you want to prove it to yourself, try this: rip a VOB from a Panny DVD and demux it into ac3 + m2v. Now run BeSweet in "verbose mode" and covert the ac3 stream into wav. You'll see a great big blur of "illegal asymemtric 7-valued ac3" and "illegal assymetric ac3 value" running up the screen. Maybe 10 or 15 times per second the verbose error messages will spit out "illegal ac3" value. This is due to a screwup in the way the Panasonic encodes ac3 and the company has just never fixed this problem. It's been there from day zero and it's still there.

I never have *any* such problem with converting ac3 demuxed from a JVC to wav. Never even a single illegal asymmetric value. No problems. Period. And since I often do audio noise reduction by converting ac3 to wav and denoising it in Cool Edit Pro, this is a significant issue.

[chonan3]

same here.
have been using the new "multiformat" Pan for about a month. Got it at BB. Need to take it back in a few days if I'm not going to keep it.
Wanted it for dubbing Beta hi-fi to DVD.
Have made numerous copies using fixed speed and flex.
I think the copies look pretty good. The flex copies play in other players.
But then tried to put them in the PC and most of them won't read.
1/4 maybe started with PowerDVD.
The rest of them were not recognized by the pc.
and DVDdecrypt didn't see them either.

I bought this machine for the price and the ability to use plus or minus format discs.
I'm not sure what to get otherwise - but I can't keep playing tapes over to make copies with this Panny. I have to have a machine that produces usable copies in the PC.
I haven't even tried recording with DVD-ram yet.
So, do I get a refund at BB and look elsewhere?
back to the drawing board.
thanks to everyone who posts comments.

[trhouse]

chonan3,

I am surprised by your difficulties because I am using a similar setup. A Panasonic DMR-ES10 has been used to create a multi-family set of dvd's from compiling vhs and vhs-c tapes. About 150 dvd-r's have been created with the ES10.

Since these are compilations, about 25 dvd's are captured at one time. The dvd's are then placed in two computers, one with PowerDVD and the other with DVDExpress for viewing so the dvd's can be properly identified and labelled. So far, zero failures.

The media is 95% Taiyo Yuden, 4X dvd-r with a few CMC, X8, dvd-r thown in.

[chonan3]

Thanks

I downloaded a firmware upgrade for the dvd Writer in my pc.
Seems to have made a big difference.
So far - every one that wouldn't play now plays.
But I haven't tried ripping to the harddrive
that's next.
thanks treehous