Me vs. the machines, pt. 2

[gwyn]

I wonder if someone who's more technologically adept can answer this question. I got a dvd recorder for my A/V system recently, and have begun transferring over some of my tapes to disc, starting with my beloved Now and Again. Today I made a disc from a tape, finalized it, and it chaptered through it to test how everything looks. I found this constant pixelization all the way through, with sound dropouts, stuttering, etc. I didn't notice this on the first tape, so I took the disc and played it in my Mac dvd player. It looks flawless, no pixels on the same spots it was terrible in on the recorder. It's a Samsung recorder, very good quality, and I thought initially it must be the tape player, because it's a crappy Panasonic S-VHS that has never stopped giving me trouble. I thought maybe tape dropouts were causing it, but it looks fine on the computer. What's likely to cause such a viewing discrepancy? When it doesn't pixelize, it looks perfect. Is this some kind of playback problem? Is something wrong in the signal? I just don't know why it would look that bad on its own source machine, but not elsewhere. I haven't yet tested it out in my Sony, though. And the media is good old Ritek discs, which have never caused me trouble.

Comments

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

I have a Panasonic DVR and if I set it to anything other than the absolute highest quality (shortest time) recording, I get horrible, pixelated results.

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

It doesn't seem related to quality, as I have that set high. It seems to be related to playback after I've recorded. I found if I turned it off and tried it again, it behaved almost perfectly. I do not get it.

[zoerayne]

I got a bad batch (of 200! omfg) of Ritek discs a while back and was having pixellation issues with my Pioneer set-top DVD-R and they wouldn't work at all in my TDK computer DVD-R. Bleh. I just junked them (200! OMFG) and moved on.

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

The discs seem fine when I tst them out elsewhere. I guess I'm going to have to chalk it up to the annals of "what the fuck" or something. I found if I turned the freaking machine off, turned it on again and loaded the disc, it would play okay as long as I didn't chapter too fast.

[melinafandom.livejournal.com]

If it plays back fine on your Mac, then there's nothing wrong with the recording, so it has nothing to do with the speed you used recording the disc. It's a playback problem.

The player you tried the disc on (the Samsung recorder?) is probably not liking the disc for playback, even if it records to it okay. Do you have access to a Norcent, or one of the DVD players that's extremely forgiving? I would try it on one of those and see how it looks. I also would try a different brand of media, and use a fairly low speed disc. E.g., even if your recorder can record on 16x media, I'd try 4x or 8x. A lot of players don't do well with the 16x discs, even if they are supposedly backward compatible.

In general, I would disagree with the notion of recording everything on the highest-quality setting. I also have a Panasonic recorder, and discs recorded in the one-hour mode do not play back on other machines. Also, it's basically wasting space to record stuff on VHS or SVHS in one hour (and I would argue, even two hour) mode. You can't improve on the source by going with a slower speed, and on my recorder, the four hour mode is just as good as VHS and S-VHS tapes, quality-wise (probably better). You might want to do a couple of tests and see if you can tell the difference.

I use two hour mode just for convenience if I'm recording a two hour vid tape or something, but when I was copying over TV shows, I wanted to get as many episodes as I could onto a disc. A 22 episode season takes 11 discs at 2 hour mode. Even with commercials edited out, a third episode won't fit. The same 22 episodes fit on 4-5 discs with 4 hour mode (5 episodes per disc for slightly longer older shows; 6 per disc for recent shows that only run about 42 minutes).

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

They're 4x discs (the recorder only wants those, and anyways, I have to buy 'em in bulk because that's all my computer will take). I do notice a slight difference in quality on six hour, but I haven't tried four hour. One of my problems is that I keep forgetting to monitor the recording, and so I'm just getting them in one big glob, and I should be separating each ep so it's easier to get where I want. But I'm trying to do this while I'm working in the other room... I might try to experiment with four hour but I'll probably save myself frustration later if I vid by using just the two hour.

I think there's just something wrong with how it plays back after recording for some reason. I don't get it, but once I turned it off and then on again, it was fine. All I can do is roll my eyes and give a big shrug.

[abbylee]

It sounds to me like your dvd player just isn't fully up to the task of playing those disks. It's possible that if you burn them on a slower setting that the error correction will be better and your player will read them better. Also, are you encoding them with the default fps etc? Too fast or too small or someting and it might just be your player struggling. Or it could just be that your player needed a good kick in the bum like most electronics.

But this is *so* not my area of expertise. I'm just guessing.

[claudia-yvr.livejournal.com]

I have no technical advice to give, other than echo abbylee in terms of burning the DVD at a really slow speed.

Oh, and to squee -- that series needs to be saved on DVD for posterity (and vidding)!