Journal Journal: Just bought a new DVD player, old one was a year old...
Why replace it? Well, I'm in the process of converting a lot of old video tapes (including the entire series of Babylon 5) to VCDs since I hope they won't degrade as fast as video tape. Also a lot of family video tapes. My old DVD player would only play VCDs burned on CD-RWs which was a drag. The RP56 will use CD-Rs and also will play mp3 CDs although I hear it's kinda crappy (no id3 tag info displayed for example...)
No, I haven't hooked it up yet so I don't know for sure.
I read some good things about the RP56 and it's fairly cheap ($229 at Best Buy).
I cap the vids with a Hauppauge WinTV PVR. It was an impulse buy while in a store. NEVER IMPULSE BUY. I got the USB version and later found out they have a PCI version.
But it doesn't matter because it's absolute CRAP. Not the hardware, the software that it comes with. It takes forever to initialize, change channels, and the mpeg-2 files it produces seem wrong. They playback fine in its own player, but in WMP and other players depending on the codec a person has loaded, it often displays in an incorrect aspect ratio (like 480x640 instead of 640x480) and sometimes distorted. mpeg-1 caps seem fine, which is what I am using to burn VCDs but still, I wanted better mpeg-2 capability for some purposes.
I edit the caps with Cyberlink's PowerDirector. So far I am pretty happy with it. It allows editing of mpeg-1 and mpeg-2 streams without having to re-encode the entire stream. It can just remove or insert segments and just encode the changed places. That's pretty impressive when you consider an mpeg stream is not a non-compressed frame-based file. Ever try to edit a compressed file in place without re-compressing the entire thing?!
However, and I blame the Hauppauge crap software, when PowerDirector edits an mpeg-2 stream produced by the hauppauge, it often crashes. I am able to, if careful, load a hauppauge (stupid name btw) made mpeg-2, go into the cropping feature, "stretch" it to normal size, then convert it to mpeg-1, then edit THAT stream OK. But too much mucking with it causes a crash.
(To be fair, it might be the hardware that is crap and not the software since the device does mpeg encoding in hardware...)
But, to get back to original point, the wintv device has composite and audio line-in jacks so I can hook my VCR up to it and do caps fairly easy. That's pretty nice and it actually works fairly well considering it is a USB device. It's just the software it's bundled with is crap.
Oh, one more thing. When buying the box, the kid on the floor tried to push the $50 4-year warranty on me. I'm like, "What, you kidding, a year from now I'll be throwing this bitch out and getting one that can deal with DVD-Audio as well, so why would I need a longer warranty."
