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View Full Version : * Quick - Standalone DVD recorder/burner for TV? *



Darrell KSR
11-02-2012, 02:34 AM
Scenario- my Pioneer DVD recorder--standalone, simply dump my camcorder to the hard drive on it, then burn as many copies as I want--has bitten the dust.

School play tomorrow (err, later tonight, I guess) night.

Need to clear hard drive space on my camcorder so I can record 3 nights of the play Friday, Saturday & Sunday.

Do NOT need this to be attached to a computer. I do the most basic editing only--cutting out excessive scene changes, but nothing else, then make copies. I've been doing that for years and happy.

I will head to some audio/video stores tomorrow locally, but thought if anyone had a recent recommendation, I'd look at that first. **Must be able to buy in store tomorrow. **

CitizenBBN
11-02-2012, 04:11 PM
Good luck Darrell. I've had little luck with a way to archive my games and other recordings in a simple way, esp. HD. I used a Tivo II with a dvd burner the same basic way you use yours. I didn't even know they could do editing but I guess it makes sense.

Even as I type this I'm ordering far more computer equipment than I care to so I can get a media center set up. I have to have a place to put the games, and Leigh wants to be able to show Netflix and such on the TV.

Darrell KSR
11-05-2012, 12:13 PM
Well, it worked out ok--decided to dump stuff from the camcorder to my computer and hope for the best. Actually dumped it to my notebook computer, which does not have a DVD drive on it. Picked up a Liteon DVD external burner ($42 at Walmart), does not require an AC power supply, just two USB ports to power it, light and tiny. Windows Movie Maker, and Windows DVD burner built-in (although it came with Nero software I have not installed), and works perfectly (although slow to encrypt the DVDs). Love that little Acer notebook I bought last year; use it for carrying to ballgames, hdmi output for espn3 games to my TV, built-in SD card reader, and now using it as my primary "media source" for burning DVDs. Think I paid $199 for it last year at Target. That's maximizing what you get, for sure.

Managed to get 3 nights of the play fine, and have burned multiple copies of a basic editing (titles, scenes, and cut a running time of a play that lasted 105 minutes down to 76 by removing most of the "blackout" scenes changes) of the first two nights; will do night 3 tonight.

This is a temporary solution, but it worked like a charm. And I needed a little DVD/CD reader/writer for the notebook anyway.

CitizenBBN
11-07-2012, 02:19 AM
Dumping it to the computer would be the way to go, but you excluded that option in your request. So isn't your solution cheating? ;)

That's why I'm setting my media system to dump it all to the computer. I can edit it, replay it, burn it, upload it and send it to someone, back it up. Once it's on a computer you can do whatever you want.

Pain in the butt to figure out how to do that within the context of the whole system, think I've got it figured out. I'd do as you're doing, you can even get a terabyte USB drive for cheap and store it all there.

Darrell KSR
11-07-2012, 06:25 AM
Very much cheating, and not what I (wanted) to do at all. I just bought time with that solution.