Recording TV Shouldn’t be THAT Difficult

Topics covered:

DVD Recording Errors

VHS Recording problems

Sylvania ZV450SL8

Pioneer DVR-650H

ATSC Tuning

NTSC Tuning

HDD vs. DVD vs. VHS

I suppose I am one of millions of people who used to watch one TV Show while recording another to watch later. We would all use VHS Tapes. In the old days you could buy some fairly reliable VHS Recorders… ones that would last 3 or 4 years. But that was long ago. I think the manufacturers finally peaked at the point where they could make the things very cheaply, out of the cheapest components – weak motors, lowest bid bearings, and electronics from the very latest Developing Nation to discover the Factory System while still having just the faintest inkling regarding Quality Control. Oh, the machines would have to be meaty enough to last through the warranty period. So, in the end they were selling us 60 day VHS Recorders. And the tapes seemed to have taken the same trajectory downward. In the Old Days I would use a single tape for years on end. Now, most tapes can’t survive through to their fifth use. The Industry seemed to have had a Race to the Bottom. Some Brands were worse, but none were good. You can take apart a “Premium Tape” and find, well, just throw-away parts… indeed you’ll come away surprised that they last as long as they do.

Anyway, I was getting tired of the cycle of buying new tapes, hoping I was having a chronic tape problem, only to find I needed a whole new machine. Or sometimes the failures were mercifully catastrophic – where a machine would just die, saving me from the nagging “it could be anything” kind of problems… forcing one to go out and buy head cleaners, new tapes, and eventually whole new machines anyway.

I was looking at my old machine, that Sylvania, that was slowly giving up the VHS ghost and noticed on the other side it had a DVD Recorder. Problem solved! I thought. So I went out and bought some DVD Read Writable Disks and got to work. Guess what I found. “RECORDER ERROR Can not record on this Disc E 4 5403900”. later I would get E 4 54043e02

It turns out that the Manufacturers agreed upon a common standard for Error Codes, but they won’t tell anybody what they mean. You can even search it on line and not find out any real information on these Universal Error Codes… I guess the Companies found a way to purge the Net, or they have assassin teams. Anyway, nobody is will to tell you what these codes mean. As far as the General Public is concerned, they all mean just about one same thing – “You’re Screwed!”

But I found a lot of Web Traffic from other people who were having RECORDER ERROR messages. There are a lot of problems out there. First, there is a difference between DVD+ and DVD-. The old machines, and mine was an old Sylvania ZV450SL8, don’t recognize the DVD+. Then there was the Speed Problem. The Old Machines don’t recognize the new speeds, and nobody sells the Old Slow DVD Disks anymore. Oh, you can try to buy new-old discs online, but half the time the Sellers will ship the Fast Ones thinking they are doing you a big favor… faster is better, right? Then the problem that breaks the Camels back is not all disks work in all players. Some Machines from some Manufacturers like Disks made by one company but not another. Nothing on the packaging tells you this. Some of the User Manuals, on page 37 or thereabouts, warn that special brands must be sought out, but who reads the manuals anyway?

You know, Government Regulated Standardization would have precluded all of these problems. We really do need Big Government… no, we need a HUGE Government. This letting EVERY manufacturer build and sell tricky recorders and tricky tapes where nothing works with anything else, and so much time and money is wasted playing mix and match… well, it all could have been settled in one big Planning Meeting where specifications could have been decided upon once and for all. And if something doesn’t work, then some Big Ass CEO goes to jail and a Vendor License gets lifted. No more getting stuck with useless Memorex Tapes. It all makes me wonder whether Archeologists digging up our Landfills thousands of years from now will be left to puzzle why Trash Dumps all around the World were peppered with spools of Memorex Disks still fresh in their packaging. I suppose if they still have Capitalism, they will understand quickly enough, for as long as Capitalism remains alive then the notion and appeal of baiting Consumers with pretty but useless junk and ripping them off will never be entirely forgotten or abandoned.

Well, but shaking my fist at the sky would not help… not indefinitely, anyway. I had to believe that something out there might work – that some certain Brand and Model of Machines with some certain Brand of Disks could make for a useable combination. They couldn’t all be bad, could they? So I did a huge Web Search to find something that I could confidently go out and buy. But I just found that there are a million problems out there. Yes, there were happy customers out there, but they seemed far too relieved. Everybody was going through way too much trouble! Oh, one guy On Line gave out the cogent and probably prophetic warning that DVD’s were probably a transitory medium anyway, and that it would be crazy to get over-invested in it, and that if one still had an old piece of junk VHS recorder and a pile of tapes laying around the house that still worked, then try to get another couple of years out of them to last you up to the point where we can all laugh derisively when the well deserved Death of DVD comes as it surely will. Unfortunately, my machine was choking on my last few tapes and I need something new now. I was missing TV shows.

You know, we have been in the middle of a Memory Revolution – hard drives with dazzling amounts of memory, and even little memory sticks that each have a hundred times more data capacity then NASA had in total when they ‘said’ they landed a man on the moon. With so much Digital Memory available so cheaply, why were we all still dicking around with disks and tapes? Why not just run the TV Shows into pure memory, simple and sweet?

Yes, there is TiVo. Isn’t that what TiVo does? They have a Webpage that doesn’t seem to work.. or I couldn’t make it work. Anyway, the word I picked up on TiVo is that it is akin to being in a kind of Cult or Secret Society that one has to join… that you can’t just buy a TiVo machine and go home and fire it up. I’ve heard that people have to sign up for stuff. Maybe you need to tithe and attend Sunday services for it. I’m not sure about anything…as I said, their Web Page wouldn’t even work for me. And it all sounds far too complicated from what I have heard in the general ambiance. Remember, it is all only about recording one TV show while one watches another. It shouldn’t involve monthly payments, calendar schedules, sworn oaths, giving up first born children and dancing naked at the bi-annual human sacrifice ceremonies. If I wanted that kind of thing, I’d buy a Saturn.

But once I got the idea of Pure Memory Recording, I searched around and found that Pioneer made a few Machines that might do the job for me. So I ran out and bought one right on the sport, right? No, wrong. There has been another Big Problem plaguing the TV Recording Crowd and that is the Tunerless TV Recorder – VHS or DVD Recorders without the “Antenna In” and “Antenna Out” Connectors. They sell them all over the place now. The first time I bought one, I didn’t believe it when I got it home and found that there was no place to plug my Cable. Honestly, what good is it? Yes, yes, the Sales People tell you that you can get a Top Box or a Set Top Box. But the stores never have one in stock to sell to me. I was told the Cable Company would be glad to rent me one… if I wanted to stand in line for it, and then add to my monthly payments. It was disgusting. Technology taking these huge steps backwards. New Recorders not able to replace Old Recorders.

Anyway, after looking long and hard I found Recorders with Tuners – with Antenna Ins and Outs. The boxes were labeled as having ATSC Tuners. And these worked fine. It turns out, though, that ATSC Tuners are specifically made to handle the new Digital Signals. But most Cable Companies are still putting Analog Signals out over their lines. Yes, they are receiving Digital Programming on their end and we can see the signs of this when the picture freezes or gets choppy or the voices get out of sync… all Digital TV problems, but the signal actually running down our cables is Analog, that is, unless you are actually paying extra to specifically get Digital Channels and those highfalutin HiDef Channels, and even then you will probably still have a range of Analog Channels… in my area is it channels 2 through 64. You know, we should be very happy and grateful that the Cable Companies are converting these signals for us, at their end, or we really would need those darn ATSC top boxes. Oh, if the Cable Companies ever do give up on giving us free Analog Conversion, then we will need not just one ATSC Tuner, but we will need Double Tuners, so we can watch one show while recording another. I saw it mentioned a few times while I was doing all that searching around. It all might happen in 2012, to coincide with all that other End of the World crap.

Anyway, I looked up the Pioneer specs and could find nothing anywhere that said anything about its having an ATSC Tuner. This was when I still thought that was what I needed. But in the Tuner section of the Specifications it listed NTSC. So I looked that up. It turns out that NTSC is Analog Tuning… what I had been getting all along. You see, the ATSC Tuners I had been dealing with were designed to recognize and pass-through Analog Signals to some bare-minimum NTSC Analog tuner that the TV would recognize. I thought I had been using the ATSC Tuners, but not really… not in the full sense. But I was getting a Picture and I was happy. I never knew the difference of the fine details.

Oh, by the way, Retail Salespeople are mostly young lazy idiots. Yeah, for minimum wage, what would we expect, but they are around the stuff all day long. It’s their job to know this stuff. Or maybe it is a matter of them being too young and too dumb to have any communication skills or realizing what the World really expects of them. In a highly technical business they need to be able to come to terms with all of the complexities involved – they need to know what all the little Letters and Logos on the Boxes mean, and they need to be able to explain their applicability to the Customer’s World and Requirements. But these kids are out of our School Systems. They think that they were doing fine with barely passing grades. Really, the schools do a great disservice to the children by providing so many Passing Grades in their Evaluations – A, B, C, D. Only ‘F’ flunks. Only 2 Grades are necessary for any Educational Evaluation – “Perfect” and “Go Back and Try Again”. Until they master everything that is expected of them, they should not be allowed go on and get out – keep them in School forever, or transfer them straight to Prison if they pass some certain age limit. But the Schools should not be allowed to release these idiots into the greater society. The Schools with their system of ‘Good Enough’ does not prepare these young people for a World where good enough is simply no longer good enough.

And with some of those kids one needs to wonder of their honesty. This one Pioneer Model in one large well stocked Audio Electronics Specialty Store had “Antenna In” and “Antenna Out” connectors, where the Tuner is, but it was not the traditional threaded 75 Ohm Cable Input that we are familiar with. He could find an adapter only for the “Antenna In”. I mentioned that I need “Antenna Out” also. He said “You are only recording, so you only need the ‘In’”. Well, I had explained earlier what I was doing – recording one thing while watching another, that the Signal has to be able to run through the Recorder to the TV Set for both things to work at once. He either didn’t understand, or he was lying to me. He was either stupid or he thought I was. That bothered me.

Anyway, when I finally understood that the Pioneer Machines probably would be able to work just fine with the cable I had at home, with their HTSC Tuners, I went out and bought one of their Machines.

I found a small shop where the Owner was the salesman. He had a bench in the back with equipment stacked up. He knew what all the Letters and Logos on the boxes meant. He knew ATSC and NTSC and showed me in his shop the hookups I would use at home, and that they would work. He was fun to talk show, and the demonstration was fun. It verified everything I had learned in all of my Web Searches.

I got a Pioneer DVR-650H. It has a Hard Drive with 250 Gig Memory… that is a lot of hours of TV. It also had a DVD side. Yeah, a lot of people buy these things so they can illicitly tape movies in the theaters with their camcorders and then ‘burn’ Cheap Pirate Swap Meet Copies to sell on the street. Salespeople were assuming that is why I wanted to buy such a thing and were giving me all the Details of the Pirate Trade, and I had to interrupt several times with “Excuse me, but do I really look that sleazy?” Oh, but the machines were rather pricey – three times what I would have expected to pay for a new VHS Recorder. Yes, so I guess it would be nice if the machine could help pay for itself, sleazy or not, wouldn’t it? The asking price was $699 but after I told my sad tale to the Store Manager, he good-willed a hundred bucks off the top and let me have it for $600 even. I was grateful, but still wonder how much just a Hard Drive Thing would have been. Maybe Pioneer should think of making something that can be used purely in the case where somebody wants to watch one TV Show while he records another. Sometimes spending a little bit for a machine that does the one simple thing that one needs it for is preferable to spending a ton of money for a machine that does that one simple thing, while also being able to do a million other things that will only collect dust, never be used, and slowly rot away from neglect. But, then again, it might simplify manufacturing and marketing to have One Model that keeps everybody happy. The big price bite was probably the Hard Drive thing anyway. All the other extras probably did not add up to much at all. So I should probably stop all my bitching.

This Pioneer thing, the DVR-650H, does seem to be a very good machine. For one thing, the NTSC Tuner seems to be a notch above the simple minimum that came in my Sylvania ZV450SL8. The same Cable Signal going to the same TV seems to have a lot more sharpness and clarity. Maybe even the DVD side works. I don’t know. After all these DVD problems I’ve been having, I simply don’t want to have to screw with it.

The important thing is that the HDD Side works very well. HDD is what they call the Hard Drive half of the thing. I thought I was having problems at first, because I couldn’t set out a “Title” which I thought it was necessary to do (you see, I had started to read the Manual. One should NEVER read the Manuals… they only confuse you and put ideas into your head). Anyway, if you just start to record something then the Machine will automatically give it a Title – referring to the time of day or the channel one is recording, which one can edit later at one’s leisure. I was actually making it quite harder than it needed to be. Really, it is almost as simple as just hitting a single button.

Oh, I took a guess and started to PLAY a previously recorded TV show while recording a new Recording, and, WOW, it lets you watch what you recorded before while recording something new. Now that’s progress! That old VHS Machines couldn’t do that.