To DVD ot not To DVD DVD ot PVR 515

Adrian B

Those are single tuner machines. The problem is that as soon as you introduce a DVD-R into the mix, you dramatically increase the complexity, and hence the cost. You abandon the bitstream recording approach in favour of recoding everything with an onboard MPEG2 encoder, which you have to license (if you are a reputable manufacturer). When you do that, you also lose quality, and you increase the storage space requirements. Two tuners would need two encoders, further increasing the cost and complexity.

If you want to retain the elegant bitstream recording to hard drive approach of the twin tuner Freeview PVRs, and also incorporate a DVD-R, how do you implement it? One way would be to transcode from the recorded format into a valid DVD format. The complexity of doing this will vary between channels, because of the different resolutions used. I don't know if any custom embedded solutions exist that can do this, or if they would have to be developed. More cost. A simpler solution would be to decode to analogue, and then feed this through a standard MPEG2 encoder - just as in the existing DVD-R machines. This has the additional benefit of allowing the machine to accept external analogue inputs, which people would probably expect anyway. But what would this look like to the user? I imagine that off-the-shelf solutions would only enable the DVD to be written in real time. And what if you wanted to do some editing? What impact on the normal operation of the recorder would the user be prepared to tolerate while a DVD is being written?

Although the idea seems attractive, it's not such an obvious winner as people expect.