CyberHome CH-DVR 1500 Progressive-Scan DVD+R/+RW Recorder and Player , Silver
Immature Product
I hope the CyberHome engineers who designed this product will read this review as it may help them fix some of the fundamental flaws in this product.<BR>Lockup problem: - as other users have reported, any unknown disk issue, which the firmware does not know how to handle, such as unfinalized CD, non English MP3 file names, some VCD CDs, certain brands of blank DVD +RW disks - causes a lockup, i.e., the recorder will go into disk &quot;Read&quot; mode and stay there forever. It will lock up and not respond to any command, not even after a long power off that should normally reset MOST computer controlled devices. <BR>I suggest the following design solutions: <BR>a. Inititialize the software program at every power-up. <BR>b. let the &quot;stop&quot; and &quot;eject&quot; commands have absolute and unconditional priority. If the software/firmware does not know how to handle a disk, let the controller go to the error handling mode and ALWAYS allow the disk to be ejected.<BR>c. provide a pin hole in the front panel to allow a manual emergency disk eject, similar to PC DVD/CD drives.<BR>d. provide a RESET button on the back panel.<br />My final advise to CyberHome: please, test, test and test again your prototypes before you release them as products to the market. <br />DGAL, NJ USA