Sunday 11 September 2011

Dvr With Hdd - dvr with hdd


I have a Toshiba HDD recorder and was looking for another one at ebay. After bidding on several of them and losing because the bids went too high I learned of the Magnavox. I originally considered the 513 because it was cheaper and its 320 GB was large enough for me. Then I found out that the 515 is not just a larger hard drive, but has an improved remote and saves your settings for an hour in case of a power failure, unlike the 60 seconds of the 513. Now that I have this one I like it better than my Toshiba. Toshiba has chapter mute which allows you to instantly skip commercials, that the Magnavox does not, but in almost every other way the Magnavox is more convenient to use. Besides that, I made too many mistakes watching football with the instant skip and jump too far ahead when there was no clear mute between commercial and program. If I am recording a program with the Magnavox and want to start watching from the beginning all I have to do is press the play button and it immediately starts playing from the beginning. With the Toshiba I had to press time slip and reverse search to get to the beginning. This is so much simpler and no more frustrating mistakes like sometimes happened with the Toshiba. If you wanted to stop a timer recording with the Toshiba you had to get up and press stop two times on the the base unit. That prevents you from accidentally stopping a recording. Magnavox does it by pressing stop twice on the remote, much simpler. I needed my reading glasses to find the stop button on the Toshiba. You can program two consecutive programs with just a 2 second gap; a 1 minute gap on the Toshiba. This also has 1.4 HDMI, which is important in connecting to my new 3D TV. It also links to my TV, so if I turn on the recorder it also turns on my TV and selects the correct input and audio source. It also has a digital tuner so I have connected my old antenna to it as well as my fiber optic TV. I can't fine tune the picture like I could with the Toshiba, but my TV lets me adjust the video settings for every input and saves the settings.



I am so glad I wasn't able to buy an old Toshiba at ebay. You would have to pay almost as much for a used Toshiba (and my first one failed after six years) as you do for a new Magnavox. The bonus for me is that the Magnavox suits my needs much better and the black unit looks better in my setup because everything else is black.



There is a more complete review and explanation of functions at avsforum. Magnavox MDR515H 500GB HDD and DVD-R with Digital Tuner

Tired of paying almost $200 per month to my cable company, I decided to ditch one of my DVR's and replace it with an HDD DVD burner with digital tuner. After all, some programs deserve to be burned to DVD and kept "forever" rather than being recorded to a hard drive on a DVR unit that will eventually fail or be turned in. I purchased the Magnavox MDR515H from Amazon after visiting two local Best Buy stores. Neither carried any DVD burners. Bottom line, the popularity of these units is nowhere near VCR levels.



I selected this item over the less expensive Magnavox MDR513H because this is a newer model and I figured Magnavox (Funai) addressed any issues they may have had with the MDR513H.



After receiving the item, I set it up, auto programmed the channels, and learned the basic features in little time. This unit works and functions great, and it's fairly easy to use - especially if you've owned a DVD burner previously. Basically, it's a DVR with a DVD burner and a 500 gigabyte hard disk drive (records up to 620 hours). In fact, the video quality is comparable to and the audio quality better than the DVR it replaced. NOTE: always use an HDMI cable to get true video quality.



I'm very happy with this unit. Unfortunately, if we (the public) don't buy enough DVD burners, the market may continue to dwindle and we will have squashed the best defense against high cable bills.

This recorder fits my needs perfectly and was exactly what I was looking for. I refuse to accept the business models of Tivo or the Satellite/cable company policy of renting these devices and paying a monthly fee. You can't own them outright! The Moxi is simply too expensive. I had this device hooked up in minutes and was recording to both DVD and the HDD in no time. The picture quality to HDD is excellent. It isn't HD but Standard Definition (SD) but I'm not using this machine to archive collectables. Just time record, watch once then erase. There are many options to connecting this device depending on your situation, i.e cable but no cable box, antennea only, satellite/cable box, etc... In my situation I simply had this unit connected to my Elite Pioneer AV receiver via the RCA audio/video input/outputs. I use an HDMI cable for playback to achieve the upconversion to 1080p. My Cox Digital Cable box is connected to my AV receiver. Note there is no HDMI Input. This is not an oversight from Magnavox. No DVD recorder or DVR device sold in the US can have an HDMI input.



To those who connect these type of devices to AV Receivers with DTS digital audio decoders, note that for DVD playback this unit will not stream DTS, if the DVD has such encoding. Not an issue for me since also have a blu ray player that can do this. Probably not an issue with most anyone who would read this but I thought I would mention this anyway. - Dvr With Hdd'


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