Any Word on a High Definition DVD Burner

[daytonhorn]

I have all low definition stuff. I like my Panasonic burner that allows me to edit out commercials, etc. I want to buy an HD TV and TiVo, but would really like to be able to make HD DVD's. I record all Texas football games and selected basketball and baseball games for my personal, home use library.

A video store guy told me that there might be some computer programs that would work, but there could be some compatibility programs.

How about an auxillary hard drive for my TiVo so that I could at least store the games till a burner is available on the market?

Thanks for any advise.

 

[Ignatius]

Pretty much the only way you can do this and keep it true HD is to capture the signal over the air, edit out commercials through any software capable of editing Transport Stream files (the native format, you'd be better off not capturing to MPEG and then editing) and then burning it onto a Blu-Ray disc. This obviously limits you to network (only ABC in our case) games, but any solution attempting to use your cable/satellite box will ultimately result in downconversion of the signal to SD. This is not by accident, the cable/sat companies don't want you to be able to save media on your own, they want you to have to rely on the eqiupment they lease you....

If you're interested in it, though, I've got a MyHD tuner card, a copy of Adobe Premier Elements, and a Sony Blu-Ray burner that I've used for a year or so and it works great, a total outlay of about $300. Was able to take a few games on vacation with me this year which was pretty cool, plus I imagine if you have an iPod there's some way to get them onto that as well...

 

[Dewbrewer]

How much do the blu-ray discs cost? And how much time can you record on them with some decent quality?

 

[Ignatius]

Right now you can get a 15-pack spindle of single layer (25GB), write-once discs on Amazon for $43, so about the cost of a good VHS tape in the old days. On that disc you can fit about 4.5 hours of HD; a game with all the commercials edited out will consume about 2.5 hours of that, I also like sticking the late-night ESPN highlight show on there (although that part is going to get downgraded to SD)...

Having said all this, I didn't really pay attention to the next-to-last sentence of the original post. You can also get a 1.5TB drive for around $100 if you look for specials and an eSATA (not USB) enclosure for it for about another $30, that you can plug into the back of your DVR. This will (at least on a DirecTV box, I don't know about TW or Tivo) replace, not add to, your existing capacity (the box will ignore the hard drive inside when you do this), but give you about 320 hours of HD capacity...

 

[alden]

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