DVD v VHS

[maltaron]

Ignoring the argument regarding digital/analogue quality, what is the advantage of DVD over VHS other than size. If I want to record on VHS (or any other tape-SVHS,Betacam etc) I stick a tape in the machine and press "Record". With DVD, I first need to select the correct disc type, then the machine reads it, then it must be formatted in the correct format, then set the record mode and then press "record". Its then a lottery whether it works. The same goes for playback, If the tape has the record tab out, stick the tape in and it plays, at worst you press play. With DVD it first reads the disk, then you get a menu, then you select which track then play. I wonder how many hours of our lives we are losing due to the digital age.

 

[GRC]

What kind of DVD recorder are you using, that requires you to 'select' a disc type, and format the disc?

To tackle your points in sequence -

If I want to record on VHS (or any other tape-SVHS,Betacam etc) I stick a tape in the machine and press "Record".

If the tape has been recorded on already, you need to make sure you're not erasing the exisiting content, don't you? With the DVD recorders I use, Panasonic, if I use a disc with existing content, the machine automatically records in free space on the disc, and won't overwrite the previous content unless I explicitly tell it to as a separate operation.

With DVD, I first need to select the correct disc type, then the machine reads it, then it must be formatted in the correct format, then set the record mode and then press "record". Its then a lottery whether it works.

Again, what kind of machine requires this? I take a disc out of its wrapper, place it in the machine and record on it. I've NEVER had any discs fail to record or fail to play back, unless I've accidentally damaged them.

The same goes for playback, If the tape has the record tab out, stick the tape in and it plays, at worst you press play. With DVD it first reads the disk, then you get a menu, then you select which track then play.

If the VHS is a 3-hour tape, and you want to watch an item at 2:30, you have to FF and find the beginning of the item. With the DVD, you have instant access to anything on the disc via the menu - a time SAVER, surely?

 

[GRC]

Oh, and another thing -

Repeated plays on a VHS tape and machine WILL wear the tape and machine down, and you'll lose quality with time. Foreign matter on the tape or machine will interfere with the tape/head contact and may potentially damage both.

You don't get this effect with DVD. The picture quality and resolution with DVD are better than VHS to start with. The lack of physical contact between laser head and disc makes this format less affected by foreign matter.

 

[ChrisFrost]

The counter arguments might go something like this...

Tape is limited in picture resolution to a theoretical maximum of 240 TV lines, though in practise you would be lucky to get 180-200. DVD can deliver over 500 TV lines of resolution, and on a home recording you could reasonably expect 400 TV lines with the right source. DVD gives better definition.

VHS recordings are made in a colour under format similar to S-video, but to all intents and purposes the best quality you can get in to and out of a VHS machine is composite video, hence the limited resolution. DVD is recorded in a digital component format. The player can accept compisite, S-video and RGB so the recording and playback quality can be of much closer to the original quality.

DVDs do not need rewinding

DVD has chapter skip and faster search modes - You can find what you want quicker on disc than on tape.

All DVD recorders automatically title and chapter their recordings. The best that VHS managed was indexing; a feature found only on step up and top level VHS decks.

How many VHS recordings has been lost because they've been accidentally taped over? That can't happen accidentally on DVD.

DVD is a contactless recording medium. Tape requires that the heads are in contact with the tape - this promotes head wear and also degrades the recording slightly at each pass on playback.


There are pro's and con's with each format. By the turn of the millennium baseband VHS had been around for almost 30 years in the consumer market, and 20 years of that time it spent as the dominant home recording format, so it had pretty much reached the zenith of produce development. By the looks of things DVD recording will be replaced by solid state/HDD/Blu-ray or some form of on-demand streaming in the not too distant future... or a combination of all of them.

 

[maltaron]

Interesting to read the comments. I posted this purely to start a discussion and replies so far are interesting. As I said, ignoring quality issues, but replies are mentioning quality which is another subject. And to comment on one reply, there are at least 4 types of blank DVD, -r, +r, -rw, +rw. And few recorders can use all of these allthough they will play them.

 

[JohnD]

my panasonic DVD recorder does all types including RAM (and also has its own Freeview tuner which is great). You are right though that the older earlier ones had difficulty with some types, especially I think if they were recorded on a different make. the newer ones seem to be labelled as playing all types.

I almost always use +RW though (the non-rewritable ones are cheap, but only if you are recording something that you expect to keep and never want to record over)

 

[ChrisFrost]

As I said, ignoring quality issues, but replies are mentioning quality which is another subject.

Apologies about that

And to comment on one reply, there are at least 4 types of blank DVD, -r, +r, -rw, +rw. And few recorders can use all of these allthough they will play them.

I'd tend to say that there are three disc formats: +r/+rw, -r/-rw, Ram. The record once and rewritables are simply functional differences within each format rather than distinct formats in their own right. Now compare that with the tape based formats for home recording:

VHS
S-VHS
D-VHS (not officially launched in Europe, but some units made it across from the US as personal imports)
Betamax
Super-Beta
V2000
Philips N1500 with the square cassette and double-stacked reels
Video 8

and with the exception of the VHS and Beta based formats none of those were inter-playable at all between decks. I'm not saying the disc based formats are perfect, far from it. But at least there's some chance of one format recording playing in another format machine. You couldn't have done that with VHS and Betamax

 

[timtheenchanter]

I got sick of my DVD recorder, kept on recording, then failing to finalize properly, ending up with useless "recordings" or write once dvds becoming coasters, tried various brands/types of DVDR/RW and got the same result.

in the end built myself a media centre (soon to have a sat receiver put in) and record to 3 Tb of HDD with a dvd burner in it for the times I want to put it on disc (2Tb in use 1 for backup)

 

[ericmark]

I remember before DVD hit the market we had 12 inch discs and 7 inch discs we could hire with films on. In Hong Kong the video shops did not like hiring tapes as their life was so short.

I still use analogue and digital tapes (Mini DV) and have used V2000 and VHS. And non had any way to preserve a recording without locking whole tape.

The DVD recorder to me has one bad feature in that it has to be in stand-by to use a pre-set recording time. Not a clue why! It also losses all recording information after a power cut.

The first DVD recorder I used re-recordable disks with as these allowed one to blank the adverts. However I will admit I lost more recordings on DVD then ever I did with VHS or V2000. Especially upsetting when it was last of a series of recordings and when last one failed it blanked the lot. At least with VHS you still had all earlier recordings even if you did get a power cut with one.

The second one has a hard drive as well and I always remove adds first before writing to DVD and if the write fails you can always do it a second time. Still with that rotten stand-by thing but it does allow you to record what is in live disk. i.e. Last 6 hours. It will not allow me to transfer VHS tapes onto DVD like first one though. (Copyright) And since the loss of analogue TV the auto up-date of clock has failed. I still from time to time have a failed DVD but since on hard drive first no longer any real problem. And since I can do all chopping and blanking first I use the much cheaper write once DVD's.

However I now also have Sky+ and with this a power cut loses no information. Of course it can't record while there is a power cut but you don't have to re-enter all the programs you want recording. However it has stopped us being able to record in old way as it can't be programmed to change channel only to record so all have to be first recorded on Sky+ box. This means to record to DVD is a three stage affair. First record on Sky+ then transfer to Hard drive on DVD recorder to remove adverts and finally write to DVD.

I find I record to DVD a lot less now. Mainly home video and children's stuff. We tend to record on one of hard drives watch then delete most of what in the past would have gone onto a VHS or DVD. So much is repeated very little is worth keeping.

When DVD recorder goes wrong I have found best to unplug and allow to re-boot before trying again. It seems to be nothing to do with make of DVD all makes seem to work. However my Dad's player will only work with one sort and I can never remember if + or - and I have taken around wrong type many times.

As to quality I did notice more failures when set to lowest quality so EP seems to be best for loads on disk without the disks failing. I have only a 32 inch TV and although HD ready I have not got HD eyes so no point in high quality recordings.

So yes I do agree a stand alone DVD is in many ways not as good as the old VHS in reliability. However combine with a Hard drive of some sort then it is far better.

Main thing a spool of 10 DVD's takes up about same space as 1 VCR and all my DVD's fit into one cupboard but I have bags and bags of VCR's many with wrong details as to what has been recorded and it takes hours to run through to find what is on them. So with exception of 1 TV with build in VCR in bed room and a few specials viewed on that. All VCR's are slowly being binned once we are shore they have not got family films on them.

I will admit this finalising thing is a pain. Lost count of times I have forgot and taken for someone else to view and had to return home to finalise first.

So in conclusion yes the DVD writer does need so serious improvement but combine with a hard drive and most of the problems are overcome.

 

[GRC]

"The DVD recorder to me has one bad feature in that it has to be in stand-by to use a pre-set recording time. Not a clue why!"

You mean you have to put it into 'timer' mode in order to use the recording timer.....? What else would you have it do?

 

[GRC]

I'm surprised at those who have to select disc types, format discs, and especially at those who report failed finalising, and 'coasters'.

In a number of years of using DVD recorders, I can't recall a single instance where I ended up with a coaster, other than through my own operator error.

The machines I use recognise the type of disc automatically, and also prompt the operator when eject is pressed on a non-finalised disc. The machine prompts with "Are you SURE you want to eject this disc? You can't play it on other machines yet. Why don't you finalise it NOW."

Panasonic for me, every time - whether VHS or DVD recorders.....

 

[GRC]

...And to comment on one reply, there are at least 4 types of blank DVD, -r, +r, -rw, +rw. And few recorders can use all of these allthough they will play them.

Why would you want to use all of them? The first two are variants on write-once, the last two variants on write/rewrite.

 

[ericmark]

"The DVD recorder to me has one bad feature in that it has to be in stand-by to use a pre-set recording time. Not a clue why!"

You mean you have to put it into 'timer' mode in order to use the recording timer.....? What else would you have it do?

Where I am watching the program to be recorded I would have expected it to start recording without needing to turn off the unit. And where watching another program to have given a warning then unless I manually intervened to swap channels and record.

It is so easy to forget to put the unit into stand-by and as a result it not to record. Yes it puts warning on screen but I often leave it running with TV turned off. Then use the 6 hour live recording when not busy. So don't see warning.

The Sky+ machine does auto default to recording if I don't intervene. Although it can mean it's a few minutes late starting. But that is what one would expect. Whole idea of timed recording is so you can leave the unit unattended. If you need to be there to see screen messengers it rather defeats the whole point.

You must be very lucky to never have a failed DVD. OK may be only 1 in 50 if recording using standard play. But when set to super extended play more like 1 in 5 failures. (Which is why I don't use it.)

First unit came from Aldi and I expected it not to be best quality. Second was a Philips which I had expected to be better.

Even Sky+ is not perfect. Should there be any loss of signal instead of like the VCR recording it anyway so you could watch a series anyway even if picture was distorted. The Sky+ box auto aborts and marks as "Part Recorded" so even if fault (Window cleaner in front of dish) clears you still loss rest of program.

Since going to Sky+ the failure rate is very low and I am not worried any more. Maybe 0.1%. But it does happen. And DVD's do fail to record. I don't use as coasters they go into bin as otherwise may get mixed up.

But the higher the quality of recording the less failures I get. And re-writeable disks seem to be better than once only discs. I am sure if all recording was done at standard play with re-write discs I would get no failures?

So one needs to ask what record level are "maltaron" and "timtheenchanter" using? Also what record level is "GRC" using? Once one realises why they fail you can do something about it. But I did not realise at first it was related to how much you squeeze onto each disc. Although at 8 hours per DVD it is reputed to be same quality as VCR if at 4 or 6 hours per disc they don't fail then that's best option.

However once transferred from Sky+ to DVD hard drive one can't select quality. And lowest quality works A1 with hard drive it is only when putting on DVD it fails. So when my daughter asks for a copy of something recorded at low quality there is no option.

I have also noted that some recordings seem to be suspect. I will guess signal loss for few seconds when recording. And although one can watch on hard drive it fails every time one tries to write to DVD. So with terrestrial distance to transmitter may make a difference. And with Sky the further North one is the more likely one is to lose signal.

Transferring from cam corder to DVD using fire wire it has never failed so does seem likely to do with reception of original signal.