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The Burning Mysteries of DVD Recorders

The VCR has enjoyed a 25-year life span in the world’s living rooms. If yours is shaking in the corner whenever you walk past it, nervously blinking away, it could be because it knows its days are numbered: there’s a standalone DVD recorder in your TV room’s future. We’re not talking about computers and DVD authoring, we’re talking about a VCR replacement. It looks like a VCR (only thinner and sexier) and it acts like a VCR (push the Record button on the remote to record), but it uses cheap, durable discs instead of tape.

Like the VCR, you have a few decisions to make when buying a standalone DVD recorder. The companion Buyer’s Guide should help. The following article will help you interpret the column headings in that guide, which match the subheadings listed here.

If you usually like to keep and archive the programs you record, a write-once format is what you want. The two write-once formats are DVD-R and DVD+R. In the end, most people just don’t care which format you use: both formats are on the same sized disc and play back in the same players. More than a year ago, we declared the format war over when we found that DVD players that played DVD-R discs also played DVD+R discs (and, of course, vice versa), which means that there really aren’t any compatibility differences between the formats. That doesn’t mean that these discs will play in all players. We did find many older DVD players that would not play any home-burned DVDs (older meaning two years old or older in this crazy disposable $50 DVD player world).

The rewriteable formats follow a similar +/- naming convention: DVD-RW and DVD+RW. Rewriteable formats allow you to record, erase and re-record, just like videotape. DVD+RW offers a somewhat greater degree of compatibility with current DVD technology than DVD-RW. Neither RW format is as compatible as either of the write-once formats.

The final rewritable format is the DVD-RAM, which has some recording advantages, but is not compatible with most other standalone living room DVD players.

Currently, no living room DVD recorders use blank dual-layer media, but that feature is inevitable. Currently, dual-layer blank discs are relatively expensive and fairly rare.

Somewhat similar to a VCR, most stand-alone DVD burners have various recording modes. The shorter the recording time, the lower the compression ratio and the higher the quality of the playback. The highest quality mode (HQ) allows for an hour’s worth of material on a standard (single-layer) DVD. SP Mode records two hours worth of material and, for most people, is almost as good as HQ. EP mode offers four hours of recording time and SLP six hours, but you are going to take a noticeable quality hit using these options. Not all manufacturers will necessarily follow the same conventions for the names of recording modes, so make sure you know how many hours the recorder you’re considering can record.