CyberHome CH-DVR 1500 Progressive-Scan DVD+R/+RW Recorder and Player , Silver
Does everything it claims, a few rough edges, no support
This DVD recorder does everything it claims. I needed a recorder that would play back PAL and NTSC DVDs to any TV (PAL or NTSC), could be made region-free, and could record a PAL input signal as well as an NTSC one. This machine will do all those things, although there are a few gotchas which it took me a few days to figure out.<br />First impressions: the unit is enormous! It's much wider than any other DVD player I have (I've owned several other players). Three blank DVD-RWs are supplied in the box, which is a nice touch. The region-free hack (magic remote sequence) is easy to find on the web, although I gather it may not survive a firmware upgrade. Since I own DVDs from three regions, many of which will never be released in region 1, this was an absolute requirement.<br />Playback of PAL DVDs to an NTSC TV is excellent. I haven't tried playing NTSC to a PAL TV though. You can occasionally confuse the unit by switching between a PAL widescreen DVD and an NTSC TV signal -- the aspect ratio goes wrong, but it sorts itself out. The unit will in general convert a PAL input to NTSC output, and I assume vice versa.<br />Recording: if your input signal is PAL, your DVD will be PAL, and vice versa for NTSC -- you can't record a PAL signal to NTSC or vice versa (even though you can output a converted signal to your TV). I initially had some problems recording from PAL VHS tapes to disk, as the recording had the wrong aspect ratio (525 out of 625 lines shown) and the frame rate conversion looked terrible. I discovered I could fix this by setting my VCR's output format to \\"PAL\\" instead of \\"THROUGH\\" (I use a Samsung worldwide VCR). I don't know how this makes a difference, but it does and I've had no further problems recording PAL. NTSC records without a hitch. I don't know any way to remove Macrovision with this unit however.<br />Note to an earlier reviewer who said his scenes and edits didn't work on other DVD players: Read the ******* manual. You have to perform a \\"Make Compatible\\" step on DVD+RWs (the equivalent for DVD+Rs is called \\"Finalize\\") before the edits will be recognised. There's a nasty gotcha here however: the onscreen feedback makes it look as if \\"Make Compatible\\" takes only a few seconds, but then your machine behaves as if it has crashed. In fact \\"Make Compatible\\" takes a few minutes (the time seems to vary). It hasn't completed until the highlight appears on the Title again on the title screen. Other than this point, the manual seems quite helpful and easy to follow.<br />Other notes to other reviewers: the date function on my unit is correct (gets the day of the week right). And if you can't understand a 24-hour clock, you're not intelligent enough to own a DVD recorder.<br />Editing is fairly straightforward, however chapters you insert end up only approximately where you put them (within about a second or so).<br />Other annoyances: the fast-forward and rewind modes have lots of different speeds, x2, x4, x8, x16, x30 and x60, which is nice. (Slo-motion forward and backward and frame by frame as well). The speed you get often bears no relation to its name however. The correspondence seems closest with commercially produced DVDs, but with DVDs I've recorded myself, x16 is closer to x160 and is way faster than all the others. When entering titles for the segments you record, you have to use the arrow keys on the remote to cycle through the whole of 7 bit ASCII to spell out the letters one by one. You can enter numbers directly but there's no shortcut to entering letters, which gets very tiresome very quickly.<br />If you've got a collection of VHS tapes in a variety of formats quietly dying in a cupboard, this solution is much better than the other one I tried, namely a Hauppauge video capture card on a high-spec PC. You get less fine control over things such as menu graphics (you get no choice at all in fact, and no details such as chapter submenus), but the failure rate and general \\"drive you up the wall\\" factor isfar lower. And it functions well as a general-purpose DVD player. <br />Note that you appear to be on your own support-wise however: questions I emailed to the manufacturer on the customer support section of their website went unacknowledged and unanswered. Fortunately I subsequently solved the problems myself. Only three stars because of this however.