DVD Players / Recorders
As always, your first thought should not be what DVD or PVR to buy, but how – and to what – you a...
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As always, your first thought should not be what DVD or PVR to buy, but how – and to what – you are going to use your new DVD or PVR. Let us begin by explaining the acronyms; DVD (Digital Versatile Disc ou Digital Video Disc) is a player – and in this article also recorder, that records to a disc, like old times’ VCRs. A PVR (Personal Video Recorder) does the same but records, and plays back, from a hard drive. They operate similarly but the difference is that if you go for a PVR you can not bring your recording with you and the hard drive might be full if you just record and record without erasing earlier recordings. The benefit with a PVR is that you always has all movies in the player and that it has other features such as pausing a program at a point, for example to answer the phone, and then continue from that point after the conversation.
So your first choice will be whether you want a DVD or PVR. Well, some DVDs have a hard drive built-in so those give you the benefits of both versions, but are a little bit more expensive. Upsides, with a DVD you always have room for more recordings, as long as you get more DVD-discs. You can also take a movie to another player by just taking a small disc with you. The downsides are that you need to load the movie you want to watch, if you suddenly want to record something you must load an empty record into the DVD recorder – and consequently you can not watch one recorded movie at the same time as you record another. The benefit of a PVR is, as earlier mentioned, that you have all movies on one disc, you can play and record at the same time, and you can pause a TV program, while the PVR continues to record and then starts from the same point you paused at. The downsides are that as all your movies are stored on the hard drive and if something goes wrong with it all your movies will also be destroyed or damaged.
Most PVRs have some kind of interface to a computer or a DVD recorder though, in order to enable you to make backups – which are strongly recommended, even for DVD recorders.
Some issues are the same regardless of what version you buy. First be sure that the chosen model has HD capacity and digital as well as analog connections for both sound and picture. In some cases you might need more than one set of connections if you, for example, are going to connect your DVD or PVR to your computer as well as your TV set and/or home movie system.
After deciding which DVD or PVR to choose between, read tests of the interesting models. Bring some of your favorite movies with you to the store so that you can compare picture and sound quality with familiar movies before buying the DVD/PVR.
TIP:
Make back-ups of all of your recordings if you want be sure; a recording is often more valuable than the price of a back-up media.