I get delivery of a new Panasonic Smart TV on Saturday.
It has the ability to record using a USB HDD or Memory Stick. I have looked at the manual and it is a bit light on how to use this feature. I am interested to know what the size to hours of recording ratio is and whether just any HDD with USB will work okay. I do know it has to be formatted by the TV.
Any tips will be appreciated by this novice with a CRT TV.
Regards
John
I take it, it has 2 tuners ... or you might end up having to watch what you're recording (IIRC one of Amstrads TV/Video combos was like that !)
Depends on the Codec and quality you choose to record at ... I would guess 1Gb/Hour at 720p, although I am sure there are others more expert ... avforums might be the place to ask. The main concerns (obviously) would be RW speeds, but on the basis my Linux box can handle true blu-ray rips with a standard USB2 HDD, I would be surprised if you had any problems.
When you say the TV has to format the HDD, is it also going to copy- protect it, so you can't lend it to a friend ?
If its like my PC freeview recorder it just takes the stream from the broadcast and records it. This is easy to do and requires almost no processing power (I had it working on a Celeron 300 CPU and had idle time to do other stuff). This means the space used depends on the channel being recorded. The main BBC channels would use the most and stuff like Channel 4 somewhat less. The quality will remain as broadcast. The main BBC channels were running at about 3-8 M bits/sec VBR last time I looked IIRC.
On Thu, 01 Dec 2011 16:48:45 -0000, DerbyBoy I get delivery of a new Panasonic Smart TV on Saturday.
You might find that it has a bizarre limit whereby the hard drive has to be a minimum of 160 GB. So that rules out any memory sticks. And that Panasonic only claim the feature is validated for one range of Buffalo drives. And they seem not happy about the idea of using a bus-powered drive. And all recordings are restricted to that individual television only - can't even be played on another television of identical model. Very disappointing limitations.
Of course it can only record what the TV is getting - but that gives you, potentially, pause and rewind of live TV which is, actually, 90% of what I want.
I have a Panasonic plasma with that facility. I have never used it because we also have a Sony recorder. It is supposed to do immediate "direct" recording, so that you can delay the programme whilst answering the door. It also has a programming facility, much as separate recorders do.
Googling produced comments that suggested the TV was somewhat fussy about the disks it would accept. In an idle moment I connected a disk that I had at sometime inserted into a cheap case and connected it. The TV recognised it and formatted it for recording. Sometime I will try another disk.
Continuing to play with the TV control, having removed the USB hard disk, I accidentally pressed the direct record button and was surprised to see messages appearing on the TV screen. It had turned on my Sony recorder, permanently connected via HDMI, and was recording the programme being received by the telly.
It is all far too clever these days. :-)
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