Philips DVDR880 DVD Recorder

On the subject of price, back in 1996 it seemed good value to buy a PhilipsVR747 VCR for around £430 and blank 4-hour tapes could be purchased inbulk packs for the equivalent of £2 each, so that’s how I justified thingsto myself when this DVD review unit had to go back to the PR company and Ibought a multi-region model myself for £365 from Richer Sounds in lateFebruary, although as I write a month later the price for the standard modelhas dropped to just under £330.

The cost of the discs is a snip too. A website with which I have no affiliationbut which sells blank DVD+R discs, the cheapest being little more than a quid, ishomepage.ntlworld.com/emperordalekand as I typeLordoftheDeals.co.ukknock out DVD+RW rewritable discs in a standard DVD case – as opposed toa stack of discs in a ‘cake tin’ – for a penny under two quid each.

So, once you’ve hooked the machine up is it as easy to use as a standard VCR?I think so. Like a VCR you can tune in and record from all the basic analoguechannels. They can also be sorted into an alternate order if so desired (I haveSky and Freeview floating through my system via RF just in case I need to,albeit in mono, and these weren’t picked up in the order I wanted), but youcannot rename them unfortunately.

You can also record from any other source you can shove down a SCART connection,even another DVD if it’s a home-made one. Retail DVDs tend to containmacrovision which aims to prevent copying, but there are so many devices outon the market which can strip this right out and while such a thing isn’t legalI cannot pretend that the ability isn’t there.

Where I find this unit most useful is to use it in combination with my TiVo.Gameshows like Never Mind the Buzzcocks will never get full releaseson DVD, and for those that do you can’t guarantee they’ll make it onto thehome format complete with all music as broadcast since separate rights haveto be obtained, as proved with the recentCold Feet Series 5.

As I did regularly with my VCR, I’d start any recording with the machine pausedand ready to record once I unpaused it. The manual doesn’t appear to mentionthat on a disc’s first recording it’ll need to initialise the menu and’post format’ the disc, so I’ll press ‘record’, then ‘pause’ half-a-second later,and once that’s ready, ‘stop’ so it’ll get the disc ready for the first properrecording.

It’s worth mentioning that for any new recording you make, that you ensurethe cursor is pointing to the next ‘Empty title’ at the bottom of the menu, soas not to record over anything currently on the disc. You may be able tore-record whatever you like on a rewritable disc, but for a write-onceanything deleted or recorded over won’t give you back the valuable disc space.

Also, on a write-once disc you can’t divide a title. That function, when usedon a DVD+RW allows the splitting in two of anything recording onto the disc,so if you, for example, transfer several episodes of a programme onto thedisc, you can then split them up, chop out trailers between the programmeand be left with the episodes exact and of better quality than VHS would givethem.

I found that the recording quality is first-rate up until the SP+ mode, butafter that you do start to notice the difference and by EP it’s getting closeto VHS quality. SP+ can be used if you’re recording a 6-part series from acommercial channel and are intending to strip out the adverts. The variousqualities and lengths are as below:

Those with a Philips DVDR890 also have the option of “EP+” which runs for 6 hours.I understand that it may be possible to flash the ROM in the DVDR880 to updatethe firmware so it allows EP+, but while I’ve had this denied, I’ve also heardunofficially that it’s possible. I would only do this if an official disc becameavailable though as I wouldn’t want to bugger up the machine.

Once a recording is complete you can rename it, as well as the disc’s title,although this can be a bit cumbersome doing this with the cursor buttons.Extra chapters can be inserted – and automatic ones deleted – and an imagecan be selected from the programme to use with the menu, but I’ve had problemswith both of these latter options.

Firstly, in the DVD title menu, “Make Edits Available” is meant to appear soextra chapter stops will appear when the disc has been finalised and used ina standard DVD player. However, sometimes this doesn’t appear on DVD+R discs.The manual states this means they’re already compatible, yet the extra chapters I’ve inserteddon’t show up on the DVD players I’ve tried (Creative Dxr2 PC DVD-ROM, AlbaDVD114, plus Playstation 2 and an Xbox). I know the edits won’t be compatiblewith all DVD players but I thought I’d have had a chance with at least onein four different machines. It’s worth noting that a blank disc will startwith the edits boxed checked to show they’re compatible, but after a recordingor two it just disappears(!) I’ve tried rebooting it but to no avail.

The ‘image menu’ feature caused far more problems than that, though, afterI’d filled half a disc. It froze while updating the image and absolutely nothingon the remote or the player would stop this. I gave it a few minutes to see ifit would break out of this cycle but I didn’t hold out much hope, especiallysince this process normally takes just a few seconds and I had to unplug themachine. When switched back on, the DVD was knackered. Bloody hell!

Some other non-fatal problems, but things that would be nice to see improved:

• The machine doesn’t record a teletext signal so no analogue subtitlesare available on the recording as they are on my Panasonic NVDJ710 VCR.
• The picture is a couple of pixels higher than the source. At first it wastoo much to the left, which can be adjusted in the ‘screen shift’ in the systemmenu, but there’s on reason why this should happen.
• You can’t set an anamorphic flag, so record an anamorphic 16:9 widescreenprogramme (from digital TV) to the DVD and any other DVD player won’t recogniseit’s anamorphic and allow you to set ‘letterbox’ within the menus and make therecording appear letterbox, so on a 4:3 TV you’ll need to use the TV’s ownbutton (such as “wide”) for dealing with anamorphic images. The majority of4:3 TVs from the past few years should allow this.
• Only speeds of 4x and 32x are available for faster rewinding and fastforwarding,which isn’t enough as even the Xbox does those as well as 2x, 8x and 16x.Slower speeds are available for frame-by-frame analysis, but that isn’tsomething I use much.

I did have a problem with a couple of other discs when playing back therecording, but these occurred at the start of the disc and were down to duffones for which I got a refund. However, it might be worth adding theseproblems here just in case the same happens to someone else and they’re notsure if it’s the player or the disc:

• The first was an SP+ recording where instead of adding one chapter every fiveminutes, when it got to the third one at 10:00 into the recording, the chaptersshowed, ‘3’, then ‘4’, then ‘5’, then finally ‘6’, all at the 10:00 mark.

  I ended up removing all chapter markers and found that it had omitted around20 seconds from the final recording, but it’s there – it just doesn’t want toread it. I then finalised the disc, knowing that I’d basically wasted one,and on playing it in another player it just skipped from 08:47 to 10:00and wouldn’t play that section at all.

• On a second disc, I kept a close eye as it recorded through the 25-minuteprogramme and the chapters were added every five minutes as expected. Thenwhen I played it back, at around 09:06 (during chapter 2) it jumped to09:11 and called that chapter 4. Then again, at 09:19 it paused and jumpedto 09:20, now calling that chapter 6. The rest of the disc played fine though.

But overall, it’s certainly worth buying a machine like this. Since I learnedthe hard way with a software crash after the image incident, if my TiVo’s full,until a series is complete, I’ll store programmes on a DVD+RW in SP until Ican safely delete them. It’s a bit of a kludge, but it’s better to do that thanrisk losing an entire series in the press of a button.

Another programme I’ve been saving to DVD is Baddiel & Skinner Unplanned.There’s just enough black screen before and after the programme and the adbreaks (well, most of the time in both cases), so you can usually get a seamlesscut from one part to another. I wish myTiVohad such editing capabilities, but between them they really do go hand-in-hand.

Also, the unit is remote hackable to allow discs from all regions. I bought my machinewith this as standard, the extra cost meaning it’s been modified toplay RCE DVDs, a trick from Warner Brothers for Region 1 discs, to try andstop the disc from working if it detects a player is multi-region all the timeas opposed to region-selectable where you’ll put the disc in and *then* it’llset the region.

When I bought my player, Richer Sounds price-beat an online website which,at the end of February, was selling it for £380 including delivery, soRS knocked £15 off that price. However, the standard model is now evencheaper (see the Amazon link above) and the info to make it multi-region canbe found at DVD Reviewer’s websitehere.

The DVDR880 lost a point for its once-in-a-blue-moon software crash, but whenit works perfectly it’s worth five stars. Perhaps Philips could resolve thisissue with a firmware update disc? And add EP+ recording as well? There’s noreason why it shouldn’t be able to do the latter.