Toshiba RD-XS32 Progressive-Scan DVD Player/Recorder with 80 GB Hard Drive
Good so far, can't wait until HD versions come out
I bought this unit 6 days ago and am sharing my experience so far.<br />I have about 100 hours of miniDVs.  I wanted to make a DVD of a friend's wedding, and also I want to make backups of all my old videos to store offsite in case of a house fire.  It would take months to make copies of all my old videos onto a PC-based burner.<br />The RD-XS32 does for video what my cassette recorder did for me back in the 1980s:  back then I used to make a ton of party-mix tapes.  To make a 1-hour tape, it took an hour plus however long I spent digging out source material between tracks.  If you have ever made a party-mix tape, you can make a DVD of your favorite video material using this Toshiba model.  You spend an hour copying source material onto the Toshiba's hard drive, then a few minutes tweaking the chapter stops, then a half-hour writing the DVD.  (Other reviewers here claim you can make a 4x DVD in 15 minutes.  I don't find that to be true, it's more like 25 minutes.)<br />The user interface of this unit is easier than the PC video editing packages I've looked at.  It will not replace your regular DVD player, though, for a couple of reasons:  you won't want to hand the complicated remote control to your guests or non-computer-savvy family members, and it won't play a DVD quickly when you insert it.  It's a computerized tool, not a smoothly-packaged consumer device.<br />Toshiba has a really neat button called TIME BAR which depicts graphically where you are in playback, along with all the chapter stops.<br />Others have spelled out the great things about this unit, I will write up some of the flaws which I hope Toshiba will address:<br />1.  Some actions take too much time, particularly the lag after loading a DVD into the drive.  (And the unit is non-responsive during that lag which is about half a minute.)<BR>2.  As noted in the manual, the unit will delete all chapter stops if you rate-convert from the HDD onto a DVD.  That sucks.  I want to copy source material anddo my editing at maximum quality, then dub onto DVD at whatever level of compression fits.  Why can't chapter stops be regenerated during dubbing?<BR>3.  There is a bug in the chapter stops generated on a DVD:  if you press skip-track on the remote during playback of the DVD, you will see about 1/2 second of the previous track flash by, and then the desired chapter starts.  This is *very* disconcerting.<BR>4.  Why don't devices like this have wi-fi or Ethernet?  It would be nice to share data between RD-XS32 units in different rooms, or backup to a PC.<BR>5.  How come consumer-electronics companies don't post firmware updates to products like this on their website?  This is obviously a big complicated embedded system, and no matter how good their QA is, there are bugs to be fixed.  I want access to future bug fixes.<BR>6.  You can get the installation guide from Toshiba's website but they don't seem to have the owner's manual posted there.<BR>7.  I'd like to be able to plug in a QWERTY keyboard for title editing.<BR>8.  The generated DVD menus are nice but not flexible.  And if you have multiple titles and want chapter menus in each, access to the sub-menus is depicted in small print at the bottom of the main screen.  I want to define my own menus or at least download a variety of templates from toshiba.com.<BR>9.  There are some places where the menus should have a straightforward &quot;copy from&quot; -&gt; &quot;copy to&quot; dialog.  Instead, you have to specify the copy-from source via buttons on the remote, and you get an error message if you haven't done this correctly.<BR>10.  The user interface requires you to select options by moving the cursor and pressing ENTER.  The pause/record/stop/play keys usually don't work the way you would expect them to in some places.  And there are places where ENTER causes the label on a screen item to change, so if you accidentally double-click ENTER, you get an unintended result.  Basically someone needs to go through and streamline this user interface.<BR>11.  You lose DATE/TIME frame data when dubbing from miniDV.  Why can't this be encoded on the DVD output?  At least put this in the chapter stop titles, or subtitles, if there isn't anywhere else in the MPEG2 standard to put it.<BR>12.  I don't think the &quot;TV shape&quot; selections do anything.  I twiddled with the setup menu and couldn't get it to generate letterboxes or sidebars no matter what setting I picked.<br />Well I've gone beyond my 1000 words so I better post this now.  There really isn't a rival product on the market; the RD-XS32 stands on its own in meeting the needs of the amateur videographer with a pile of old miniDV tapes that need to be brought to life in DVD format.<br />Footnote: Some hard-to-find technical info on DVD vs. miniDV:  a miniDV tape holds about 13 gigabytes, and has its own intra-frame compression which is nowhere near as efficient as MPEG2 compression on DVDs.  What makes this recorder so much faster than PC software I've tried is that it captures video from miniDV in MPEG2 format (by running it through hardware compression on the fly).  If you capture at 4.6MBps, your video files are only about 2.5GB/hour instead of 13GB/hour.  You don't have to re-render in order to produce a DVD; all data is already in MPEG2 form.  Thus far I have not figured out whether there is enough of a quality difference between 4.6 vs. 9.2 MBps to make it worth copying all my old miniDV tapes at 1 hour per DVD vs. 2 hours (there is *nothing* I can find on the web about this).  Note that I am playing all this material back on a 16x9 HDTV monitor.