Experience of JVC DR-MH20?

[andybray]

After a sorry tale lasting a year with the legendary JVC M10, it got exchanged and, rightly or wrongly, I'm now the owner of the JVC MH20 80Gb hard drive unit.

I can't see much comment about this recorder one way or another. Is it safe to assume that I won't get the same sort of problems (Loading error, green lines, audio distortion, etc).

Any sign of trouble in the first 30 days and it goes back but experiences from other users would be welcome. When the M10 worked - it worked well and so does the MH20 based on 4 days usage. It's just the reliability that's worrying me being of the same generation as the M10.

Andy

[lordsmurf]

The most common machine to have loading errors was the MV1 combo unit. And then the recorder only, no HDD. I have never heard of a HDD unit having this problem. Even then, the MV1 and M10 errors were a minority of machines. Sure, sucks to be you, if you were one of them that had it, but generally getting it fixed (which is free from JVC) or exchanging for another one is all it took to get a unit that works fine.

Again, I have never heard of a HDD unit having this problem. I don't readily recall any complaints on the M20 or M30 units.

[slacker]

Actually the MV1 issue was a BIG issue. The JVC sales reps claim that they have TONS of MV1's in their warehouses just sitting there. The MV5 has replaced the MV1 and, supposedly, fixed the loading problem.

[trhouse]

This M10 and MV1 repair thread has been running for some time,

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=28

Nearly all the reported units with the "loading" problem show a manufacture date of April or May 2004.

[DVWannaB]

After a sorry tale lasting a year with the legendary JVC M10, it got exchanged and, rightly or wrongly, I'm now the owner of the JVC MH20 80Gb hard drive unit.

I can't see much comment about this recorder one way or another. Is it safe to assume that I won't get the same sort of problems (Loading error, green lines, audio distortion, etc).

Any sign of trouble in the first 30 days and it goes back but experiences from other users would be welcome. When the M10 worked - it worked well and so does the MH20 based on 4 days usage. It's just the reliability that's worrying me being of the same generation as the M10.

Andy

Andy,

I own a MH30s, which is the same as your model with the only difference being the hard drive @ 160GB. The only serious issue was after about 6 weeks of use I experienced some power mechanism failure, which would cause the recorder to prematurely stop recording and locking up. I sent it to a JVC service center and they replaced the mechanism. Now it works great again.

The PQ is unmatched in this price range and even higher ranges.

Ergonomics (menus/functions, etc) leave a lot to be desired, as you have probably found out and will take some time to play with and experiment to learn all it can and cant do. Splitting titles, adding clips for authoring/burning and even editing titles can be a challenge. And forget the manual. It is worthless. It will be trial and error, I'm afraid. Or just ask guys on this forum.

Hope that helps a little.

[Neuron]

andybray,
I owner of both DR-M10 and DR-MH30. I use DR-M10 at home for my family entertainment needs and use DR-MH30 at work for capturing, editing, and archiving on DVD some of my research activities for future analysis and presentations purposes. Both are great recorders and so far I do not have any problems with both whatsoever. My DR-M10 is a "first release" recorder purchased in April 2004 and this is made in Japan model. We use M10 often enough, mostly every day. We have never experienced any "loading", or "frizzing", or "green lines" issues with this unit. Works flawlessly and smoothly. I have DR-MH30 for a bit more than a month and so far so good. This unit is a December 2004 built and made in China. I do not see difference in picture quality. Both recorders produce excellent noiseless and colorful video (thanks to LSI Logic software engineers for great image processing algorithms).

About ergonomics - see my comments here https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=272920 and here https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=273383 . Do not worry about stupid user interface. Nothing is perfect, but you've got an excellent video encoding quality machine and this part is more important. Good luck and enjoy your MH20!

[andybray]

I can say that the MH20 has not exhibited any of the fatal M10 problems. I did have a brief scare as I saw some green line noise once - but then it never happened again.

All in all very pleased with the unit especially given that by the time the M10 was written off as unrepairable, another year of price drops had occurred and so I only had to pay £20 extra to get the MH20. Can't compare with any other brand as my experience has only been of the two JVCs.

The MH20 user interface can be a bit clunky at times (for example moving between different view/edit options in Navigation). It is also quite a bit different to the M10 which was a bit of a surprise. Edit is still a bit basic and so I tend to stick stuff on a DVD-RAM and edit on a PC.

Not sure why it treats DVD-RAM and HDD so differently when it comes to editing. You can Divide a recording but only on the HDD and not DVD-RAM. And although you can Divide you can't Join. It allows scene editing on the DVD-RAM but not the HDD. So basically if you wanted to record to HDD and then edit out ads etc and then dub to a DVDR for a finalised version then, although IMHO this seems to be the most obvious way to want to use a HDD/DVDR, you can't easily do it.

andy

[andybray]

Getting a bit nervous now.

My DR-MH20S is beginning to misbehave. It will occasionally go into flashing "Loading" mode for no reason. This can require a power off to reset. Some titles take ages (30 seconds or more) to delete in Navigation/Edit and then it hangs at end. Recently the unit hung on the Goodbye message after I powered it off. Smacks of something like a HD read problem or something. I reckon I'll have to wait for it to get worse or else the problem will be too intermittent for anyone to fix it. Fortunately it has prompted me to dub stuff off my HD to DVD in case the disk goes belly up.

Anyone else had these problems? Sorry to say but my view of JVC DVD recorders is now pretty poor.
Andy

[andybray]

Well, fraid to say that as predicted the DR-MH20 is now dead. Or rather it just comes up "Loading" for ever. Sounds like it's re-reading the hard drive and failing.

Only minor bit of good news to the continuing saga of faulty JVC DVD recorders is that JVC (UK) are now really slick about handling DVD recorder faults. I guess they've had lots of practice. None of this "send it back to where you bought it, wait 3 weeks for a repair" etc. JVC (UK) arrange for a replacement to be delivered by courier 2 working days later.

Fortunately I had managed to get most of what was on the HD dubbed to DVD in the last couple of days. Still stand to lose some stuff.
Andy

[lordsmurf]

Probably just a fluke HDD error. This is only the second time I've heard of a JVC HDD unit going down for the count. I hear far, far, far more complaints about Panasonic HDD machines, as well as some others. Pioneer has a fairly spotless record too.

[andybray]

I'm not convinced the MH20 (or maybe other JVC HD recorders) is fault free. My 2nd MH20 will periodically hang and then crash to "Loading". Usually happens when trying to delete off the hard drive. It takes ages to delete (rather than a couple of secs) then hangs for a few minutes then crashes. It will then not recover for however long it is left without being unplugged. On turning back on it will naturally start "Loading" again. It can take a lot longer than the claimed 50 seconds to start up - sometimes I have to leave it 5-10 mins or more. Not sure if it has some sort of JVC version of CHKDSK that it does when it's not happy!

I'm sure one day it will not recover. Do I wait til then or give up now? It has about 4 months warranty left. I also now don't trust the unit and so I typically dub everything to DVD in case the thing dies - which sort of defeats the object of the disk (other than for recording stuff I don't care if it gets lost).

[Chief Wiggum]

There are serious issues with the mh20. My first mh20 exhibited all the errors with the hdd andybray mentioned. The refused to leave the loading bit.

I have had it swapped out for another machine. Now this machine is going nuts too.

i tried to delete something off the hard drive. It took ages to delete (rather than a couple of secs) then hangs for a few minutes then crashes.

I switched the machine off and left it for a few hrs. Now when i power up it starts normally but when i press record in dvd mode (not hdd mode!) the machine crashes and exhibits the fatal loading error!

I am not happy with these jvc machines.

[andybray]

Well, Chief Wiggum, glad to see I am not alone although sorry to see you are having the same problems as me. Sorry Lord Smurf but I don't buy the "isolated problem" bit anymore wrt JVC DVD/HD recorders.

Sadly, my 2nd DR-MH20 is now due to be swapped out now. For a few months I'd been putting up with the periodic disk access (I presume) problems. But it now has about 2 months left on the warranty and seemed to be playing up a bit more.

It's now quite predictable. The MH20 will hang when trying to complete an operation. This is typically deleting a recording. It normally takes 2 seconds but you see the progress bar creeping along. It will get to the end and then hangs. Or it will hang when turning itself off and you will get Goodbye on the display. Same can happen trying to divide a title and in some rare cases it will simply stop responding to the remote. In all cases it then usually reboots itself some minutes later but can then remain in "Loading" for ever. A power off and power up by pulling the power cord (the front panel ON/OFF switch is by now useless) and then being left for anything up to 10 minutes will bring the device back to "normal".

Without being overly pessimistic I don't hold out much hope that the replacement will live a long and happy fault free life.

Wish these things had a PC style reset button - I even wonder if the hard reset of unplugging the thing (when you have no choice) is actually a contributory factor in all of this.

Andy

[Kalos Geros]

maybe the HDD is fragmented - it may halp if you defragmented/optimized it...

[andybray]

maybe the HDD is fragmented - it may halp if you defragmented/optimized it...

er...and how might I do this may I ask?

Anyway, after a mere 1 week working DRMH20 #3 went into the long goodbye and then powered back up into "loading" for ever. Have to say that I now get on really well with the JVC UK swap out hotline. 48 hr turnound service. #4 arrives tomorrow but what will make me any more confident that it'll last any better. Tomorrow I will have owned 7 JVC DVD recorders in under 2 years and not one has worked for more than 3 months without developing a fault.

Note that the last one failed without ANY provocation. I never had to power cycle it when it was stuck. When I reported the problem to JVC I did get a sense that I was not alone and indeed I asked him if this was a known problem to which he replied "yes". Maybe just a knee jerk reaction or not?

[lordsmurf]

I don't know why they keeping unloading old DR-M20H units on you. That's bad service in my book. It's pretty clear they're not able to refurb those units, so you deserve a DR-M30H or DR-M300H for all your troubles.

Some many years ago, I had a laptop go bad several times. Eventually it was discovered that a small percent of them developed LCD troubles, and there was really no way to fix it permanently. Anybody who sent in the older model was given the upgrade instead (which included faster CPU, more RAM, more HDD, better LCD, etc).

JVC UK needs to get off their ass and fix up faulty DR-M20H owners with good product. I tend to think such an option would not be a problem in the USA. Then again, you rarely hear about JVC USA service returning faulty units (usually they are 100% fixed when returned).

Have you tried to go "over their head" and talk to an international office of some kind? I think you're getting jerked around by the UK office.

[Neuron]

I would call or write to Japan and file a huge complain directly to Victor corporate center

[samijubal]

The JVC machines are seriously flawed, there's just a couple of people here that won't admit it. Look on other sites for reviews, they don't fare well. My first one had the loading problem within a week. The second one had lines running up and down the screen on every recording, made from a satellite with a perfect picture. I ended up throwing away a few hundred discs because they were unwatchable. Stay away from JVC and buy Toshiba, far better picture quality and more reliable.

[lordsmurf]

The JVC machines are seriously flawed, there's just a couple of people here that won't admit it. Look on other sites for reviews, they don't fare well. My first one had the loading problem within a week. The second one had lines running up and down the screen on every recording, made from a satellite with a perfect picture. I ended up throwing away a few hundred discs because they were unwatchable. Stay away from JVC and buy Toshiba, far better picture quality and more reliable.

JVC's first-generation machines (2004 models) are the only ones which suffered "loading" errors in a small percentage of machines, and it was easy to fix in most cases, the replacement of a resistor. Some people had troubles with theirs getting fixed, as the machines were over-used with the flawed hardware, and sustained permanent damage elsewhere within the unit. Those units need to simply be destroyed (cannot be refurbished without a majority of components being replaced). I believe this last situation is where UK 20 owners are having issues.

JVC's second-generation machines, which have been around since 2005, have an entirely different power supply, and do not suffer from this sort of error. JVC machines not only have excellent quality (especially from VHS source, because of its filters), but they run almost flawlessly now. DR-M100S and DR-M300H will not give you grief.

It has been said by some detractors that JVC has a blurry image and the image is too light or washed out, but that is simply not true. That comment often comes from people who like their video butchered, with contrast and darkness not correct (which is what Panasonic DVD recorders do). The image is not artificially sharpened either. Basically, JVC does a pretty transparent transfer, plus some added noise filters to clean up the image. It will not "cook" the picture like other recorders often do. People who like cooked picture should adjust their tv, not the recording devices.

Now Toshiba, on the other hand, is a good machine with a decent image quality (no chroma noise filters, though), but not without it's share of fatal flaws. It often sees copy protection where none exists, far more often than any other DVD recorder or capture card. It is especially a problem coming off cable/satellite receivers and PVRs. Only recently did Toshiba recover from it's IRE problem.

[frozenturtle]

Since February of this year I have owned the DR-MH30 which I purchased from BHPhoto in Manhattan. About a week after I started playing around with the unit I powered the unit on and it would sit with the "Loading" message indefinitely. Some articles in this thread have mentioned that the unit would return to normal operation after an extended period of time. This was not the case as I had at one point left the unit on it's "Loading" message overnight... no change. Having no other option I returned the unit to BHPhoto and weeks later they sent me a replacement unit. Since March the replacement unit has been behaving very well and I've even started to get used to the editing menus. A week ago things started to get funny. After burning a bunch of stuff from the unit to a DVD I started to notice that some titles could not be deleted. This situation is repeatable in that when I would delete the title the progress bar (reported earlier in this thread) would go to a "very slow progress mode" and never come back. The LCD would show Navigation since this was the menu that I was last in. The only way to get the unit out of this state was to unplug the unit, after which it would boot to "Loading" and after about 10 minutes it would appear fine. The problem that remained of course is that if I attempted to delete the same title again, which previously did not delete then the same "Navigation... unplug... Loading (wait 10 minutes) ok" cycle would repeat still leaving me with the title that I attempted to delete in tact.

Where do I go from here?

I can't just let the titles sit on the unit and accumulate. Given enough time I will be left with a drive full of permanent fixtures.

I really don't want to go back through the BHPhoto return process if it's going to land me yet another bad unit.

JVC customer service tells me to go through my vendor.

Is there a way around this problem (i.e. a means to format the drive / some maintenance CD to return the unit to functional?)

Any advice would be very therapeutic.

Thanks!
FrozenTurtle

[DVWannaB]

FrozenTurtle,

My money is that your unit is suffering from similar problems I had and andybray was/is having. I believe the culprit is the power assembly inside the recorder. It is faulty (in original production) and the symptoms you explained point directly in that direction. The unit gets confused and cannot peform simple operations and freeze. Unfreezing (ie. unplugging) is only a temporary fix, I found out. The power assembly unit needs to be replaced. I sent mine to the New Jersey Service Center and they replaced that mechanism and it has been working flawlessly for over a year now. Call JVC, tell them what the prob is and that you need it repaired. The vendor has 2 options. 1 to send you another similarly flawed recorder or send to the service center, which essentially is what you can do on your own and a lot faster. Customer service will tell you the nearest Service Center to send it to. My service took about 3 weeks.

Seems JVC is stuck with faulty power assembly mechanisms that they probably purchased a whole bunch of and are still implementing them. That or maybe newly sold JVCs are actually the older models that has that bad part. Incidentally, when I received my recorder back, there was an invoice in the box, which had the power assembly unit at $100 (no cost to me). Little wonder why they have not switched to the better performing units.

[nicky57]

It is pretty obvious that when these JVC units go bad the best bet is to return them and get another brand! PIO makes a solid machine.

[samijubal]

Scrap the crappy JVCs, get a Toshiba and don't look back. I did and I couldn't be happier.

[Marvingj]

I own the JVC M10 excellent unit, you indeed have a faulty unit. Never had any problem with miness. I also own Toshiba another great unit. When you have a series of problems like that change your ventor. He must be getting bad units. JVC is a Great Machine, its very dependable.

[Ghazi]

I have owned a MH20S for over a year now, yesterday it gave up the ghost and was stubbornly displaying the 'loading' message even after a re-boot, as Andy I had to pull the power cord.
This is the second problem I have had, previously the dvd tray refuse to open and necessitated a £50 trip to a repairer, they merely reset the machine.
Alas since the price of this model have dropped so much in the UK thatt I do not believe that it is worth the cost of trying resolve the current problem.

Ghazi

[andybray]

Well having started this one off I haven't visited the thread for a while and while I'm sorry to see so many other people experiencing problems on the HDD JVC models, it does show that I was right even 18 months ago to believe that there are fundamental flaws with JVC DVD HD recorders and that I was not experiencing an isolated/fluke disk problems.

Actually I was beginning to think that JVC had cracked it. The most recent swap out actually lasted at least 9 months and maybe more. Not sure if they used a different HD as the noise of the disk was higher pitched. Anyway perhaps no great surprise that this one has now failed. I started to find that deleting a recording would hang the recorder and then it would reboot but it would always recover after about 5-10 minutes of "loading" and without a power down. So a nuisance but not fatal.

Today I simply navigated to a title in edit/delete and the device went into loading mode straight away. Not the normal problem and nothing has since persuaded it to come back. Looks dead to me.

It's now 18 months since my M10 was swapped out for the MH-20 and so it will be interesting to see if JVC will replace this one being that the original MH-20 (since replaced 4 times or so) is out of its 1 year warranty. Then again I've NEVER had any unit last for a full 1 year and I must be onto my 8th or so JVC unit in 2 1/2 years.

Actually I don't know that I really want to see it working again. A HD recorder that you know could fail tomorrow is a liability. I have no trust in the unit or indeed JVC. I now have to backup any recording I want to keep to RAM/RW disk just in case. Does mean that I've not lost anything important unlike many other owners who've seen 80Gb worth of recordings trashed.

Andy

[Bix]

JVC's second-generation machines, which have been around since 2005, have an entirely different power supply, and do not suffer from this sort of error. JVC machines not only have excellent quality (especially from VHS source, because of its filters), but they run almost flawlessly now. DR-M100S and DR-M300H will not give you grief.

Two friends of mine had the "loading" problem w/ DR-M100S machines.

[deuce8pro]

I bought a refurbished drm100 and it does exactly as Lordsmurf says with vhs tapes. Very pleased. Wish I bought one two years ago though.

[trhouse]

Did you return the refurbished M10S with the media issues and upgrade to the refurbished M100S? The M100S is a better choice. It seems to have a better designed power supply.

[deuce8pro]

Did you return the refurbished M10S with the media issues and upgrade to the refurbished M100S? The M100S is a better choice. It seems to have a better designed power supply.

I found a place that had a refurbished m100 even though no one else seemed to have one.
I had already sent back the m10 to get repaired.
Im not sure what the issue is with that recorder, maybe its just picky I dunno.
Anyways, im impressed with this machine and the results so far. Im glad I bought it.

Btw, the place I got it from still has one left if anyone wants it.