A very senior moment...

[Owain]

The Sun usually has fairly comprehensive coverage of the latest developments in breast implants.

Owain

[Tinkerer]

I know these things as PVRs (Personal Video Recorder) and have two made by Panasonic. In addition to the hard drive, there is a DVD burner. You can record directly to DVD-R or DVD-RW as well as to the HDD and, if you have a recording on the hard drive that you wish to keep; you can copy it across to DVD. You can copy the other way as well which is handy if you want to duplicate a DVD although it does involve copying twice (onto HDD the back to new DVD).

[Man at B&Q]

=A0 London SW

I made the mistake of replying in a thread containing Steve Firth.

MBQ

[John]

I worked as a cable jointer on BT for many years. If people don't know, telephone cables are sized by the amount of pairs of wires they contain - smallest these days I think is a 5pr, going all the way up to 4,800pr. IIRC, a 120m length of 200pr cable had gone faulty so another guy and myself were doing a 200pr changeover and I was at the controlling end.

After putting the last pair through I got my hacksaw and cut the old cable out to give myself more room to close the new joint - and discovered, when I was about 90% through the cable, that I was cutting through the new one.

[Tinkerer]

My Panasonic with HDD and DVD burner happily records from "most" VHS tapes. It is not supposed to record from the purchased movie type because of the anti-piracy signal but in practice it only falls over with Disney ones. Also my daughter transfers recorded films from her Sky Plus box to VHS tape and I then transfer them to DVD for her, just connect the SCART out on the VHS to an AVI connection on the HDD/DVD recorder and away it goes. You can even use the pause control on the recorder to edit out adverts etc.

[Tinkerer]

[dave]

Which is a shame for us. We collected a hell of a lot of Disney tapes from our local video rental store, most of which have never been released into the public domain.

Earlier this year I transferred a large amount of VHS to DVD just this way. My only failure was Good night Mr Thom. The DVD has to be cleaned with IPA before it will play right through. But I have found the original tape, I just need a case to put it in now, so it will play in the video recorder.

Dave

[Mark]

Google "macrovision removal".

[jkn]

Downloadibf from the topfield is certainly feasible, but a bit of a pain, as (at least with the Topfield PVR5800) the download link is USB, which is (a) slow-ish, and (b) ties up the 'toppy' whilst you're downloading.

I' hoping the next generation will have (or have already?) an Ethernet connection. I'd happily pay for one of those.

FWIW upgrading the hard drive on a Topfield is pretty straightforward for anyone with a bit of technical nous who is prepared to read up on the tpfield user group forums.

Another approach which I haven't tried is to keep the 'swapout' disk and stick it in a Linux PC (with eg. a caddyless drive bay). You should be able to play the recordings on the PC straight from the drive.

J^n

[dave]

Thanks for that, it is going to take me some time to go through it though. Got the g daughters to look after for the next 3 weeks. First week on my own while wife goes to Scout camp.

Dave

[Steve Walker]

Most units sold for copying from tape to computer will happily copy videos or DVDs while ignoring the Macrovision or similar. I've got a Roxio USB one which works fine and before that I had a Pinnacle Dazzle (DV-170 IIRC), but that particular model won't work under Windows 7 - which is unfortunately what is on the PC in the living room and hence near the TV.

SteveW

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[Mark]

I'd always recommend a standalone device rather than a USB one. Also Pinnacle do not have a great reputation. Anyway there are loads of people much more knowledgeable about this than me on rec.video.desktop.

[Rick Hughes]

Not as bad as a remote support engineer who told a networks engineer to enter command on his Sun Network station: remove -r

[Rick Hughes]

I thought about keeping a backup of my windows install with a disk image for a very fast recovery .... are any of the above freeware ?

[Nick]

In message , Rick Hughes writes

DriveimageXML is free, the others afaik aren't. You could also try gparted or clonezilla live cds.

[Mike Clarke]

And if you already have a Windows XP installation CD try ubcd4win - it enables you to create a bootable minimal XP CDROM which also includes lots or useful repair tools, including a password resetter and DriveimageXML.

Windows won't let you restore an image over itself while it's running but when you're running from the CD you have full unrestricted access to your C drive.

[Steve Walker]

I have no idea of what is available. But at the low price of the Pinnacle and Roxio ones and both never having dropped a frame, I've been happy enough using them for transferring kids films and couple of training videos. For more intensive use or if it's something that you want to keep for years then Pinnacle do seem poor on supporting newer operating systems for devices that were only recently current items, but I've no experience of any others yet.

SteveW

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