OT - sky+ / dvd strategy / boxes ?

[Adrian Brentnall]

HI Folks Only vaguely DIY - but I thought somebody here was likely to know...

Currently we have a Sky+ box, which is rapidly getting filled up with 'things that are too important to delete'

Some of the 'things' are available via the various p2p sites - so the bright idea went something like this....

D/load the material via p2p, burn to DVD on the PC then play in a DVD player

(sorry if this is all very simplistic - I'm not up to speed with dvd technology!)

I understand that it's also possible to 'back-up' material from the Sky+ box onto dvd (in real-time), if you have a DVD player/recorder.... so that may be another (possibly less complicated) plan?

So - before I go too far down this route - what's anybody else doing, and are there any recommendations for a dvd recorder that's not going to break the bank - but will do this stuff. Our TV claims to be 'hd ready' - whatever that might mean!

Thanks all Adrian

[OG]

We previously had a very good analogue Panasonic HDD and DVD recorder, but got a separate Hitachi brand Freeview+ HDD digibox about 18 months ago.

Usual practice is to record on the digibox and if we want to keep it we archive it to the HDD on the Panasonic machine. In real time, as you say, but archiving is a straightforward function to do.

Once on the Panasonic's HDD, we split the archived tracks and rename them. We then burn them to DVD.

The main downside of having to transfer between the digibox and the Panasonic is that we lose the digital signal addons, so we can't view subtitles or the program info once it's on the DVD.

'hd' ready simply means that it can accept a High Definition signal - either via a HD disc player, or a HD digital/satellite receiver.

I can't make any recommendations about p2p, as I am risk averse when it comes to malware on my PC, so wouldn't touch it with a bargepole!

[Dave]

We have Sky+ and a Philips HDD/DVD recorder (DVDR 7260H) linked by Scart. The Sky box has a "copy" facility but it's not very good. If we want to keep anything, it's:

(a) record programme on sky box (b) set sky box to play (c) set Philips box to record (recording will go onto its hard drive) (d) go away and have a cuppa (e) an hour later (or however long the programme is) go back and stop both machines (f) burn to DVD from hard drive - takes about 5 minutes for an hour long programme.

All very easy, straightforward and painless :o)

[dennis]

Done that, but you may not get the quality you want.

I have a camcorder that has video in so I connect that to the sky+, record in DV onto the PC via firewire.. edit the stuff using moviemaker.. convert to DVD.

It means it has HDMI and has a minimum vertical resolution of 720 pixels. Therefore it may be able to display HD pictures from a Sky HD box. To do the job properly you want a TV with 1920x1080 pixels and HDMI and a surround sound system.

[chris French]

In message , Adrian Brentnall writes

I don't have Sky+ or any other PVR, though I do record some stuff onto a PC with a USB Freeview tuner - otherwise it's stuff downloaded via Bitorrent (these two end up on a 'server' down in the cellar) or watched via iPlayer. Bitorrent is not a bad suggestion - it is often easier to just download it.

I don't anymore bother burning such stuff to DVD. A word of caution though re burning P2P downloaded stuff always found it a bit hit and miss IME. AS well as a bit tine consuming.

Most stuff is Xvid format. To burn this into standard DVD format, it needs re-encoding, which also means it takes up the normal amount of space on the DVD. It's not complicated, but I found a number of times that something would go wrong with the process and you'd sit down to watch it and it wouldn't play.

If I was to do it again I'd want a DVD player that would play Xvid natively, so you could burn the downloaded files straight onto the DVD - you'd get a lot more programs on it as well. (a 45 minute show is generally encoded to about 350 MB in size)

Most stuff gets watched now via a 'media PC' in the sitting room. Posh name for some bits of PC (based on an AMD Athlon 3500 CPU or something like that) hidden away in the sitting room - not even in a proper case yet. Mobo + 2.5 inch hard drive + small power supply from an old IBM desktop runs very quietly.

Hooked up to the TV it means we watch a lot of stuff via iplayer now we can lounge on the sofa

[Steve Walker]

If you've got some sort of video capture device for your PC, you can select a bunch of recorded programmes from your SKY+ box, mark them for COPY, press play (and start your video capture software) and then go to bed. They'll play one after the other without any intervention from you and then you can split them, remove ads, etc. and burn them to DVD later.

SteveW

[Adrian Brentnall]

Thanks for the comments! I guess it reall hinges on whether we're going to want to 'archive' stuff from the Sky+ box - in which case a DVD recorder seems necessary - otherwise a cheapy DVD player will do the job... Adrian

[Adrian Brentnall]

HI Dave Sounds easy ! Just have to decide how much we want in 'invest' in this project - go the p2p way and just by a cheap DVD player or go for the hard disk recorder / dvd box.... and be able to archive frm the Sky+ box

Might even do it in 2 stages - cheap one first & see how we go.....

Thanks

[Adrian Brentnall]

HI Chris

The mediaPC idea had occured to me - but it's getting a bit more 'techy' than I'd wanted - burning to DVD in Xvid sounds good - need to look out for a DVD player that can play them....

Thanks

[Adrian Brentnall]

Don't have any vidcap gear on this PC - but I can see that would be a way to go.... Thanks

[Reentrant]

You could always fit a bigger disk in the Sky+ box. It supports up to

1TB and you can quickly copy your existing recordings from the old disk using Copy+ - see play downloaded videos I use the Cyclone Micro Media Player - see - it's tiny and plays video (standard or HD) directly from a USB stick or SD card. The quality is excellent. It's amazing value for £25 and it saves all that re-encoding from XVID to DVD.

[Adrian Brentnall]

That is an amazing price..... I guess the other way round is finding an XVID-compatible DVD player - and just doing it that way ?

Thanks

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Adrian Brentnall saying something like:

Depends how good you want the p2p material to be. Sometimes it's ok, most of the time it's not particularly good, but fine for catching up with series, etc.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "dennis@home" saying something like:

32" and under, not necessarily.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Adrian Brentnall saying something like:

Almost any one, nowadays. As a basic source player for home cinema I picked up a cheap Lidl Silvercrest player two years ago that did most commonly available formats.

[dennis]

If it has the HD logo then it has those as a minimum. They are breaking the terms of use for the logo if not.

[Adrian Brentnall]

I may be reading it back to front (quite possible) but the new DVD player I've just bought reckons it can handle the following....

DVD VCD HDCD CD DIVX3.0 / 4.0 / 5.0, WMA and MP3

My downloaded source material seems to think that it's

HDTV.XviD-BiA.avi

So far, I've found software on the web that will convert these avi files to DVD format. Seems like a slow-ish process - as it's not yet sompleted one file I can't tell if it's successful or not

Just wondered if I'm going the 'long way round'....? - whether a conversion to DIVX would be simpler / faster ?

The new box has an SD-card slot and a USB port - so I guess I should be able to put one of my converted files onto a USB stick and see if it can play it ?? (Slight oversight on the techy front means that neither of our PCs can _write_ to a DVD - so waiting for a DVD-writer to arrive in the post !

Any advice welcome...

The things we do for love, eh ?

Adrian

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "dennis@home" saying something like:

I mean, you don't need the full 1080 for 32" and under. 720 is perfectly adequate.

[mike]

Well, if the player plays DIVX and the thing you've downloaded is XviD (a generic version of DIVX), you should be able to burn the downloaded file as is to DVD (ie. not convert to DVD format) and the box should play it.

That having been said, we have a cheap Aldi DivX player and it's very hit-and miss about what it'll play --- I've never quite sussed whether it's the player being sniffy or the dubious encoding of some downloaded files.

[chris French]

Like all this video/audio codec stuff, it all seems complicated, and I don't really understand it all. but AIUI Xvid is basically an open source alternative to DivX which is proprietary. But both use the same sort of MPEG4 compression.

Like I said, I ended up deciding it was waste of time.

Probably unnecessary.

You will probably find that your DVD player will play the downloaded file directly just as it is. There are apparently some features in Xvid that can sometimes cause play back problems on DivX players, but we sometimes playback files here from a USB stick and have never had any noticeable problems on our Phillips DVD player.

Stick on a stick and see.