help - loading trouble on video recorder

Flash memory devices are steadily increasing in capacity whilst the price has dropped dramatically (SD cards now up to 8 GB) However I do have to admit not being up to speed on these kind of developments, so I'd like to ask the more knowledgeable on this group 'is there any major technical reason why some kind of memory card can't became a De Facto interchangeable standard on millions of PVR's around the world, maybe coupled with MPEG4?. especially as it's almost certain that not only will memory capacity continue to improve but prices will also plummet.

SD already is a sort of de facto standard for storing material on all sorts of gadgets, mostly pocket ones, though I suspect it is used a lot less frequently for exchange of data between gadgets, because mostly people just want to swap the occasional snapshot, and they can use bluetooth or MMS for that. For swapping stuff between computers, the USB dongle drive seems pretty popular. Whatever is cheapest and easiest to use will always be the one most people use, and in five years time there will be something completely different, and Sony will invent their own incompatible version of the same thing, then a smaller one that needs an adaptor, and so on.

Rod.

Ditto for me, changing "Toppy" to "Hummy". I make DVDs on the computer and use my DVD recorder mainly just as a player.

Matti

The average size of an divx/xvid feature film is well under 1 gb. I don't know what the quality would be like on a 40" tv, but they're fine on a 24".

Archive? What's the point of that then? It's just telly - seen it once, no need to see it again.

(anyway you can transfer from HD to DVD, easily if you've got something which does it, but still possible if you haven't).

cheers, clive

Hi BugBear,

Could you repost this as a new post (without the crossposts) to sci.electronics.repair alone?

Title it as "Panasonic VCR NV-HS830B - loading problems"

The VCR Techs who haunt over there will pick up on that...

The "scrap it and get a DVD/PVR" noise is not helping your plight!

Good Lhord. What a barbarian. I watch some movies over and over again.

Yes, I have Toshiba portable portable LCD TV which has a card slot and will play DivX and MPEG4, it has a composite output for TV which produces respectable pictures on a 28" widescreen telly from a 2 GB SD card, (I saw some 2 GB cards being sold on one of the shopping channels a few days ago at £11.00 each) this is what set me thinking as it seems a logical way to go, especially when considering that people's biggest complaint by far about PVRs is transferability and their inability to archive material, even many very cheap items such as printers now have card slots built in as standard.

And there's music of course. Lots of people listen to it over and over again.

Rod.

Hmm. I'm more amenable to seeing things more than once than my wife, but I've still never gone for the collection of films-which-you've-seen which seem to be so popular. There's a sufficient turnover of stuff to watch compared to the amount I actually do watch that I never run out.

Then again, I watch the films - unlike some (not by implication you) who treat them as background.

Music is different though.

cheers, clive

That's not how it works.

The presence of a film on the shelf (and the equipment to play it) means you never actually have to watch it.

Douglas Adams correctly pointed out that a VCR is a time-saving device.

I've watched Steven Soderburgh's "Solaris" 4 or 5 times in the last 3 months. Plus listening to the soundtrack music at least once a week. And I stopped counting once I'd seen '2001' some 47 times.

And then there's "Hero". My wife and I have watched that 2 or 3 times since I recorded it. I must burn a DVD.

So Rod it would appear that apart from cost technically there is absolutely no reason why the SD card couldn't be king in the PVR world.

This evening I did a bit of experimentation, I converted an hour long TV programme from my Humax (.TS files) to MPEG 2 and transferred them to a 2 GB SD card, the total file size was 1.45 GB, and the results on my my 28" w/s appeared to be equally as good as when played back from the original HD (allowing for the fact that my Toshiba player only outputs composite video).

I know very little about MPEG 4 but I'm assuming that it's more efficient than MPEG 2, so it follows that the file sizes would be smaller, can you give me a rough idea by how much and would be resultant picture quality be as good as with MPEG 2?

Cheers Ivan

An awful lot of info on here

No practical reason at all as far as I can see. SD cards with capacities of

Rod.

Grandata always used to be quite good for vcr parts. You can usually send bits back for a refund if they turn out to be the wrong pattern. And they only charge a couple of quid postage.

Your new home sales in our home see why are you or are you so you CEDIA by the by line or year's work or home And is that to the you know who or where are you know how the mass on the are you why > 4GB (and rising) are readily available now, and the more we buy, the cheaper

Yes I was thinking that something along the lines of a 4 GB SD card becoming the equivalent of a much higher quality VHS 4 hour tape, but with some kind of LP option for maybe 8 hours of standard VHS quality. Are you why are you

It would be a simple matter of an onscreen menu asking if the user would like to transfer program/s to card.. So all it needs now then is for Topfield and Humax to get their heads together and incorporate an optional standardised card slot on their new models, I couldn't see it adding much more than a tenner in the way of additional hardware.

NE1 any experience of getting a windows PC to boot from a flash card or flash type memory at all?...