Pioneer DVR-520 and DVR-560 functionality discussion

[Seeker47]

Seeker47 i love eSATA, and still do.. but Oxford stopped making chips years ago. Every chip manufacturer did., the only consolation I have found is that SATA based motherboards or devices can be turned into eSATA hosts with a special bulkhead connector.. but that's not for normal people. OWC has discontinued all eSATA devices in favor of Thunderbolt.. so that generation (eSATA) is long gone. I still patrol auction sites looking for old eSATA gear.. but its getting pretty thin.

I don't like hating on DVD or Blu-ray.. I rather like the format.. but its incredibly small by todays standards of file storage.

I don't trust spinning rust.

But its almost all that's left.

Maintaining it by active monitoring and cloning, is tedious.. and problematic.. its not fool proof.

i seriously don't know what to do.. i am hoping m.2 proves stable since archived video is not written over and over again, but stays static on the chips.. for how long is debatable.

and I totally (Totally) agree with Orsetto

m.2 (not to be confused with the movement that became part of the socio-political fallout detailed in "Bombshell" and "The Loudest Voice" ) is a type of SSD -- correct ? I should keep up on these tech developments better . . . .

[aedipuss]

i don't mind HDD storage. my oldest nas has 63,048 hours (over 7 years) of continuous on time with the original drives. samsung knew how to make hard drives

Interesting. Fry's and Micro Centre were my 'Go-To's, never did much mail order, preferring to buy what I could see, off the shelf. I'm a longterm Western Digital buyer (Made in Thailand, only), though I'm old enough to remember when the very best enterprise or server-class HDDs were the SCSI IBM's that were made in Hungary. Best MTBF specs. I've seen plenty of Seagates and Toshiba HDDs for sale, but can't recall running into any Samsungs. A regional thing, maybe -- or just not from brick & mortar retail places ? Where did you source them from ?

seagate bought samsung's HDD business in 2011. before that they were readily available, i bought most through newegg.

[jwillis84]

the longest lived drives are only known (after) they have been on the market for a while

HGST was recently bought by Western Digital.. the Chinese Government (.. the Chinese Government ?) stepped in and was worried about a monopoly in the business where all brands were made by only "one" maker in their country..

As a condition of Sale.. Western Digital had to divest (some) of the old Hitachi (HGST) plants to Toshiba.. (who did not want them).. and Toshiba had to keep making the drives and offer them for sale.. or Western Digital could not buy HGST

Toshiba drives are kind of a "reluctant" model for now.. they didn't want the business.. but the drives are getting phenomenal reviews on sites like Backblaze.. when they can get a few in..

Seagate is rumored to be looking to exit the spinning rust business and go totally SSD.. they tried hybrids.. but that didn't work out.. they are a mystery at this point. They might go total cloud storage model and stop selling to the public in a few years. I wonder if Google or Amazon will buy them in a pre-emptive move. Big data is worried about vast cheap data.. silicon is not that cheap yet. Recycling silicon however is less complex than picking apart mechanical drives.

WD (regardless of brand) is practically the sole source supplier to the public now.. which reminds me of Verbatim and CMC.. we're down to one.. how much longer will spinning rust be around ?

m.2 to me is interesting.. since it is silicon, and the laptop and tablet/phone market is still paying for it.. its increasing in size.. and durability for long term storage might make it the best alternative to ancient "ink printing technologies" like DVDs or Blu-ray

m.2 is already at 1 and 2 TB in a surface area far smaller than a DVD or Blu-ray disk.. with 6 Gb/s interfaces with a basic compression from MPEG2 that's around 1000 to 2000 hours of standard definition video, on a single stick.

it could be a fools errand.. I don't know a lot about m.2 at the moment.. but I'm looking towards understanding it better.

Toshiba drives when you can get them are great.. but eventually they will wear out.. the old Hitachi plants will have to be replaced.. or the deal will run out.. and WD will get the Toshiba brand to put on their drives.

In ten years spinning rust will be as popular as 5 1/4 floppy disks.

[Seeker47]

I shouldn't go off like that.. it will upset people.

Pioneer BDR-2209 / BDR-209UBK

The prices for good player/burners is going back up though even for older models, which makes me wonder if they have already been discontinued and someone knows something not public yet.

At first glance, I'm seeing a from $60. to > $100. price difference on these, as between Amazon and NewEgg. In the past, Amazon (direct, not with 3rd. party sellers) had a better rep. for handling returns or refunds in the event of defective goods. Do VH readers have any strong preference on where to buy -- and considering the price spread -- with these suppliers ?

[Separately, I would add that in the case of discontinued items, I've generally had pretty good luck finding things on eBay . . . but of course you need to check on condition, avoid ridiculous bidding wars on scarce items that may be in demand, and to be picky about who you buy from.]

[Seeker47]

It really has become annoying to watch history repeat itself all over again (for those of us old enough to have seen this "movie" before). Instead of taking a balanced wait-and-see attitude, people are again running headlong off a cliff in pursuit of apparent convenience, with nary a single thought to how that might completely box them in and screw them over in the future. Consumers can't get enough of streaming, to the point its burying physical media before it can even get its coffin lid closed. And predictably, just as in the '80 and '90s, terrified dumbstruck studios are trying to stay one step ahead of a stampede they can never understand and have nothing but contempt for in any case.

Between "live for today" consumers and content providers with no clue, a destructive tsunami has been unleashed that is drowning data storage options as collateral damage. For better and worse, the computer industry long ago abandoned dedicated storage options in favor of jumping on the consumer optical disc formats. This made for some economies of scale and universal compatibility we would never have had otherwise, but after a good 20 year run the underlying subsidy of those consumer formats (CD, DVD, BD) is evaporating like dew on an Arizona morning.

Without mass market demand for entertainment system devices and media to play on them, PC data storage has been forced to migrate to cloud solutions That sort of thing is single-handedly floating Microsoft (and is a huge chunk of Amazon's non-retail business), but doesn't do squat for us non-corporate individual peasants who just want safe, private, durable storage solutions we can own and control in our homes. We finally had a decent updated alternative with BD-R HTL, but they've already begun kill it. Redundant sets of HDDs is about the only remaining option, and I hate it with a passion (too much reliance on a single magnetic technology, that requires endless nannying and periodic re-cloning).

At least we'll have the hollow satisfaction of watching the streaming juggernaut implode over the next couple years. It only really worked when there was just Netflix and Hulu funneling everything from every source: now, every studio is doing takebacks and trying to forge their own separate service. Thats going to end up being about as popular as their VHS "rental-only, no more owning, each cassette is unlocked to play just once" strategy. I'll be interesting to see what the "post-streaming" paradigm turns out to be.

It's astonishing that the issues of archival storage, in part alluded to within this thread, have not taken on a vastly greater importance and urgency -- both for companies and for individuals. That applies to most varieties of data storage. On the one hand, there is the example of some truly ancient tech: pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or sections of the original Magna Carta, and founding documents for our country that are preserved under museum glass, hopefully for a long time to come. But our latter day tech has vastly changed that landscape, with some alarmingly short time horizons. I recall reading an interesting article about storage and retrieval, devices and media, regarding what stored material may or may not still be readable / viewable well within the lifetimes of many in today's populations. And this probably gets into a general human shortsightedness.

Practical examples abound. A relative happens to be a rather skilled photographer. It's mainly a sideline for him, but he's won awards in several regional shows. A few years back, he expressed some concern to me about archival photo storage for preserving his work, ever since film and negatives gave way to digital formats. Those 1's & 0's are readily subject to being corrupted. I told him about an article I had read, about PAR files with checksums, that some more technically aware photographers seemed to be getting into. He seemed relieved. But even so, we are still left with issues of storage devices and media. For now, it would be great if SD cards had good, proven, long-term storage capability . . . but I don't know that they do.

This also gets into the area of overlap between accessibility and security. As a near-Luddite, I have a near-zero faith in today's vaunted cloud-based solutions. They are just a good terrorist-attack and the next iteration of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICloud_leaks_of_celebrity_photos

away from exposure or total wipeout. If it's not directly at hand and under your local control, it's all pretty dubious, is what I'd say.

[Seeker47]

Hello orsetto,

This seems as good a place for this question as any. Perhaps you can correct a gap in my basic video knowledge. (One of very many, I'm sure !)

I used one of my Pio 460s to record something, in this case a documentary. It had a running time of slightly under two hours, and was recorded at the Pioneer's MN21, which would be a standard, default setting for having the material fit onto a DVD-5. As such, it is going to take up ~ 4 GB of space. My guesstimate is that this MN21 recording must fall somewhat below full DVD-5 resolution -- maybe no more than 640 x 480 ? MN 31 or 32 would bump that up to the upper limits of DVD, your 720 x 480 (there was some musical content, and the sound might be better at the higher setting ?) . . . but then we'd be talking about a DVD-9 to contain it.

If I felt that the material was of sufficient importance and otherwise unavailable, I could have endeavored to share it. (Thus far, I have only been a grateful recipient of online material, and so far never a supplier.) In this case, that proved to be totally unnecessary, because with a bit of searching I found that it was indeed already available online, so no need to bother.

Now, my question. That online file version -- in 1080P and good stereo -- was just 5 GB in size. So, that relatively small size differential but major resolution and sound quality differential must simply be a matter of using a more powerful, more efficient codec -- H264 vs. the basic MPEG-2 of the Pioneer ? I would assume so, because I noticed that a better 720P version of this same program clocks in at no more than 3 GB. file size, and an HEVC one would probably come to half of that, or less. Maybe even if you threw in DTS / extra channels. (But HEVC must offer a much higher degree of compression.)

I don't suppose there were ever any DVDRs that employed much stronger codecs than MPEG-2 ? Probably not, because that was the "lingua Franca", or most common denominator for video -- consumer video, certainly.

[orsetto]

seeker47, my understanding is the Pioneer recorders follow the controversial protocol set by Panasonic: maintain full 480x720 resolution up to and including LP speed (4hrs per disc), even if the video is starved for bit rate or other parameters. Pioneer MN21 is the same as setting the unit at SP, so results should be indistinguishable between them.

Yes, it is sort of depressing that "scene" releases can pack an hour of video into a 300mb file that appears to have triple the resolution and clarity of our DVD recorders running at 2Gb per hour. But these are drawing on different resources: usually begin as direct full-HDTV-res uncompressed off air or satellite captures that are compressed using PC software more sophisticated than the hard-coded MPEG chips in DVD recorders. It would have been nice if recorders had remained popular enough to make the transition into higher power and performance, such that they could optionally create such mp4 or mkv files themselves to save as standard data discs instead of dvd-video. But interest waned rather quickly, and Hollywood would never have stood for such a feature in consumer products, so that was that.

Sometimes we DVD/HDD recorder fans forget just how absurdly consumer-hostile these units really were/are. I was reminded recently when I lent one of my friends a Pioneer to record a series that could be had in no other way unless you record it directly off a niche local cable TV service. He was fine with hitting the HDD record button, but after that was lost so I had to personally create the DVDs for him. He patiently watched me divide the two six-hour HDD blocks into 12 episodes, trim the beginnings/ends, add chapter marks, correctly title each episode, create thumbnails for each episode, select burning layout for three discs of four episodes each, burn and finalize each disc. I'm so used to it by now I can do it in my sleep: my fingers flew over the remote buttons, Pioneer action menus and submenus flashed on and off the TV screen in a blur. As the first of the three dvd volumes began burning, my friend just looked at me and said "What in the actual F--- was all that? Twenty+ steps per episode: are you SERIOUS?!?! Who the hell could ever figure that out or even want to? No wonder these machines never caught on!"

[Seeker47]

Between "live for today" consumers and content providers with no clue, a destructive tsunami has been unleashed that is drowning data storage options as collateral damage. For better and worse, the computer industry long ago abandoned dedicated storage options in favor of jumping on the consumer optical disc formats. This made for some economies of scale and universal compatibility we would never have had otherwise, but after a good 20 year run the underlying subsidy of those consumer formats (CD, DVD, BD) is evaporating like dew on an Arizona morning.

And yet, these guys

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Criterion_Collection_releases

continue releasing both Blu-Rays and even DVDs, at least for now, albeit with the proviso that substantial parts of the catalog have by now gone out of print. (Terrific reference page, btw. Should have discovered this and bookmarked / saved it a long, long time ago.) I was wondering what might come after their physical media releases ? The article seems to answer that -- another dedicated subscription service to replace the departed Filmstruck -- but I see no sign of that being offered by DirecTV. They finally slotted three Epix channels, so one might reasonably expect to find it there.

Without mass market demand for entertainment system devices and media to play on them, PC data storage has been forced to migrate to cloud solutions That sort of thing is single-handedly floating Microsoft (and is a huge chunk of Amazon's non-retail business), but doesn't do squat for us non-corporate individual peasants who just want safe, private, durable storage solutions we can own and control in our homes. We finally had a decent updated alternative with BD-R HTL, but they've already begun kill it. Redundant sets of HDDs is about the only remaining option, and I hate it with a passion (too much reliance on a single magnetic technology, that requires endless nannying and periodic re-cloning).

At least we'll have the hollow satisfaction of watching the streaming juggernaut implode over the next couple years. It only really worked when there was just Netflix and Hulu funneling everything from every source: now, every studio is doing takebacks and trying to forge their own separate service. Thats going to end up being about as popular as their VHS "rental-only, no more owning, each cassette is unlocked to play just once" strategy. I'll be interesting to see what the "post-streaming" paradigm turns out to be.

Well, you know, in the wake of this current "zombie apocalypse" we're in with Covid, it's gonna get interesting, and soon. I just heard a commentator on the radio wondering if all the folks now forced to work from home, all the kids-through-college level students forced into a strictly online instruction mode, and all the extra people who might otherwise go out but who now are cabin fever forced into just streaming, will expose the deficiencies in our internet infrastructure (still markedly inferior to many other parts of the developed world), and grind all sorts of things to a crawl ?

[Seeker47]

Sometimes we DVD/HDD recorder fans forget just how absurdly consumer-hostile these units really were/are. I was reminded recently when I lent one of my friends a Pioneer to record a series that could be had in no other way unless you record it directly off a niche local cable TV service. He was fine with hitting the HDD record button, but after that was lost so I had to personally create the DVDs for him. He patiently watched me divide the two six-hour HDD blocks into 12 episodes, trim the beginnings/ends, add chapter marks, correctly title each episode, create thumbnails for each episode, select burning layout for three discs of four episodes each, burn and finalize each disc. I'm so used to it by now I can do it in my sleep: my fingers flew over the remote buttons, Pioneer action menus and submenus flashed on and off the TV screen in a blur. As the first of the three dvd volumes began burning, my friend just looked at me and said "What in the actual F--- was all that? Twenty+ steps per episode: are you SERIOUS?!?! Who the hell could ever figure that out or even want to? No wonder these machines never caught on!"

I was looking to simply illustrate something along the lines of what you wrote, for someone who still has a (potential) interest in being able to do these things that-- after some requisite learning curve that proved to be worth the perseverance to us -- we came to take for granted. But not to the extent of mounting a cell phone or camera on a tripod and making a short video myself. So I went looking on Youtube, thinking that surely someone had done this in the past. There I found about 6 prospects, none of which were particularly good or appropriate. Most were for earlier models, like the 510 or 440; one seemed to have a Slovenian or Hungarian (?) language narration; one had blurry and shaky-cam video; another was apparently made in the U.K., although the speaker had a French accent, and it showed evidence of the dreaded EPG feature. The best of the lot was actually for the Magnavox DVDR.