A little while ago, Michelle and I noticed that the VCR we had in our living room wasn’t recording properly. Anything we recorded on in would end up having a distorted band at the top of the picture when we played it back. We started to record our shows on the VCR in our bedroom. This worked, but it was less than totally ideal.

Since we’ll be going to Vancouver for a week next weekend to visit Skip, we needed to have both VCRs in working order so that we wouldn’t miss any of our regular shows. We didn’t want to have to watch half of those shows on the distorted playback of the living room VCR.

Perhaps the simplest solution would have been to just try a head cleaner on the machine. We decided that we’d go pick one up, but I first had us stop by Fairview HiFi to check on the current state of DVD recorders / PVRs.

Needless to say, we never made it to the video store to get that head cleaner. Instead, we came out of Fairview HiFi with last year’s Toshiba D-R2 DVD recorder for $350.

(Ironically, we discovered, upon getting home, that we already had a head cleaner and had just forgotten about it…)

We brought it home and replaced our existing VCR and NAD DVD player with this unit. It’s silver and doesn’t match the rest of the equipment in the wall unit, and it’s a bit bulky so doesn’t quite fit as well as we might like but, that aside, it’s a really awesome unit and I can highly recommend a DVD recorder to anyone. The difference in functionality and ease of use is actually quite noticable. It makes me wonder why I didn’t get rid of my VCR some time ago. (Oh, right. I remember now. I didn’t have a job for a long time and then, when I did, it didn’t pay enough…)

Of course, after doing all of this, I soon realized that anything we taped in the bedroom could not be played back anywhere but in the bedroom. Similarly, whatever was recorded in the living room could only be watched in the living room.

So, just this weekend, we went back to Fairview HiFi where I bought another unit for the bedroom. Against Michelle’s “apparent” protests, because she’s since admitted that she really did want me to do this. Now we’re completely free to watch movies in the bedroom too. The unit also works much better (physically) than did the VCR we had there, with the TV being more balanced sitting on top of it.

One other thing that we ran into was the recording media. Computers use DVD+RW or DVD-RW as their recordable (and rewritable) media. They are two different standards, just like beta and VHS. The first time I bought a rewritable DVD disc (and, no, I still haven’t managed to record that episode of Nip/Tuck to it, despite many frustrating hours in the attempt) I asked what the best format would be. I was told that the one best for both data and video was DVD+RW, so that’s what I bought.

Well, with stereo based DVD recorders things are different. Rather than DVD+RW or DVD-RW, the media of choice is DVD-RAM (there’s no such thing as “DVD+RAM” so this is just a regular hyphenation rather than one of two different standards). This allows for bits of data to be written to the disc at any particular point but still accessed sequentially as a whole. So you just keep recording shows onto whatever may already be there, and then erasing them in whatever sequence you want. The data for any given shows can be spread out over multiple “spots” on the disc without a problem. They also support, so they claim, upwards of 100,000 re-writes before needing replacement.

This is all well and good, but the D-R2s I bought only support DVD-RW. In fact, there are almost no DVD recorders that support DVD+RW. I think that all do DVD-RAM (although I could be wrong about that) and most do DVD-RW. Which means that the DVD+RW disc that I’d bought was incompatible with the D-R2s. (I’m pretty sure that my NAD CD player could have played it but I never got around to being able to record a DVD that I could even play on my PC to actually test that portability.) In any case, I picked up a 5-pack of DVD-RWs from Staples for $13. With any luck I’ll actually use them.

Additionally, the DVD RAMs that came with the D-R2s were single sided. 4.7G of data, or 6 hours of TV on extended play. The units also support dual layer DVD RAMs – 9.4G of data, or 12 hours of TV on extended play. Fairview HiFi didn’t sell those, although they pointed me to Staples right across the street (where I picked up the DVD-RWs). They didn’t have them either, but were happy to place a special order for me. They should arrive within the next 10 days. If we’re really lucky, we’ll see them before we go on our trip. If not, I may need to get slightly creative with our TV recording and/or buy an extra single layer disc so I can swap things out the night we get back to get Coronation Street recorded the following morning.