Turning DVDs with Pioneer’s DVR-810H is so simple my dog could do it (true, he is a German shepherd). That’s because the deck is also a TiVo hard-disk recorder, and it restricts any DVD burning to dubbing what’s already on the hard drive. In other words, it doesn’t give you the flexibility of a standalone DVD recorder, but it’s ridiculously easy to use.
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The DVR-810H neatly melds a progressive-scan DVD player, TiVo Series2 hard-disk recorder, and a DVD-R/RW recorder in one component the size of a conventional DVD player. TiVo, as you may already know, buffers video, in digital MPEG-2 form, to the internal hard disk, so you’re always watching “from behind” even with a live program. That’s why you can pause the show or skip and fast-search through it. You can record a program by keying the record button or by pointing and clicking on a listing in the onscreen guide, which TiVo updates nightly via an Internet connection (either dial-up or broadband). You can also find programs and schedule them for recording by title, genre, actors, and more. TiVo’s Season Pass feature can even record an entire schedule of a regular show, with or without repeats, as you direct.
Setting up the DVR-810H was easy. You follow an intuitive setup routine and, after an initial data download, it boots up fully operational with TiVo’s Basic functions activated. The usual pause, slo-mo, and fast-scan operations all worked, and I could record by simply pointing and clicking. But the onscreen guide stretched only three days forward. If you want more sophisticated program-search options, a guide that covers a full two weeks, Season Pass recording of a series, and considerably more, you’ll have to upgrade to TiVo Plus service and pay $12.99 a month (or $299 for the life of the recorder).
There’s also the $99 Home Media Option, which enables multiple TiVos on the same network to share programs and access music and photos from networked PCs or Macs. It also puts an online program scheduler at your disposal so you can set your TiVo to record from any computer.
The DVR-810H will seem an old friend to TiVo owners, with the same familiar, Mr. Peanut-shaped remote control, the same easy-to-navigate menu structure, and the same automated recording of programs the recorder “thinks” you may want to watch. I won’t go into these in any further detail (tivo.com has good explanations of them), but I must point out two foibles of the Pioneer as a TiVo recorder.
First, as in every hard-disk recorder, the DVR-810H’s hard drive is always on, and in a quiet room you can hear it whirring away. Second, the only TiVo controls on the front panel are play/pause and FF/ REW. If you lose the remote, you’ll still be able to play a DVD and pause/scan TV, but you won’t be able to change channels or use any other TiVo features until you get a replacement handset.
About that remote, it’s sensibly laid out and easy to use. The TV Guide-powered onscreen guide is clear and well designed, showing a channel list along the left and several hours of programming on the currently highlighted channel. However, this is the DVR-810H’s only full guide display. Unlike other TiVos I’ve used, it won’t let you toggle to a more comprehensive, full-screen grid with channels running vertically and time horizontally.
To one degree or another, all broadcast/cable hard-disk recorders I’ve tried — TiVo, ReplayTV, or PC-based — have suffered a common limitation: having to encode and then immediately decode standard TV programs in real time. Video quality can suffer from MPEG-2 artifacts like subtle, mosaic-like distortion or a finer loss of resolution I call “digi-grain.”
The good news: either the DVR-810H’s MPEG-2 encoding is better, or I’m growing more tolerant, because programs stored on the Pioneer looked distinctly better than my recollections of two earlier-generation TiVo boxes. (Video quality still wasn’t as good as from a satellite-TV receiver/recorder, which eliminates on-the-fly encoding by storing MPEG-2 data directly.)
The DVR-810H can record at four different quality levels on its hard drive, all retained when a program is copied to a DVD: Basic, Medium, High, and Extreme. Basic allows 82 hours on the hard disk, 6 hours on a DVD-R/RW; Medium gives you about 55 hours on the hard disk, 4 hours on DVD; High about 27 and 2, and Extreme about 13 1/2 and 1.
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| You can fit 12 episodes of Scrubs on a single DVD-R recorded in Basic mode on the Pioneer DVR-810H. |
I found the difference between, say, High (which I used most of the time) and Extreme to be subtle, but the drop from High to Basic was dramatic: Basic recordings didn’t look much better than LP-mode VHS — and with an overlay of digititis. That said, it does allow you to put 12 episodes of Scrubs on a single 85¢ DVD-R.
As I said earlier, you can’t record directly to DVD. You also can’t dub programs from the hard drive while they’re still being recorded, edit recorded programs in any way, or change the recorded bit rate (quality level). So if the ballgame you TiVo’d ran only 2 1/2 of the 3 hours scheduled in the guide, your DVD archive copy will be stuck with the extra 30 minutes of whatever the station broadcast following the game. And, of course, while you can skip past commercials when you play a TiVo recording (or a DVD of one), you won’t be able to edit them out of the DVD.
You can record to the DVR-810H from an external source such as a camcorder, a VCR, or another DVD player, but only via composite video and stereo analog audio, and then only to the hard drive. Then you can transfer the program — again, totally unedited — to a DVD-R or DVD-RW. You’re also limited by copy-protection restrictions. The Pioneer let me dub a DVD movie to its hard drive, but I couldn’t copy it back to a blank DVD.
The upside of all these restrictions is the brilliantly simple user interface. From the “Now Playing” list of programs already stored on the hard disk you simply select one, then select “Copy to DVD” from the onscreen choices. The recorder prompts you to insert a blank DVD and to name it. A disc pie chart represents how much space will be occupied, and if you select additional programs the chart updates accordingly (and the “Now Playing” list crosses out all remaining programs that are too long to fit the space that’s left).
It’s all absurdly easy — and fast. The Pioneer dubbed four half-hour TV episodes to a single DVD-R (occupying 99% of the disc) in just over 23 minutes — better than the 4x for which the disc was rated. And you can watch or TiVo-record a program while dubbing another to DVD.
The DVD dubs I made were indistinguishable from the same recordings viewed from the hard disk — after all, I was simply dumping bits from the one to the other, so results depend entirely on the record quality (bit rate) I specified for the hard-disk original. The DVD-Rs I made played on all three standalone DVD players I tried, as well as on my Mac PowerBook, but not on a Sony PlayStation 2.
Creating a TiVo Network
Pioneer provided a second recorder, the $1,800 Elite DVR-57H, so I could check out TiVo’s Home Media networking option. I patched both recorders to my home office’s Ethernet router using wired connections, which required buying a USB-to-Ethernet adapter for each one (about $30) since they have only USB 1.1 ports. (If you have a wireless access point, you can use a USB-to-Wi-Fi adapter, but TiVo warns that a wireless connection will be slower.) A networked TiVo can also use your broadband Internet access for its daily updates of guide and other data, eliminating sluggish dial-up connections.
With an assist from TiVo’s Web site, setup was uneventful, and it all worked pretty much without a hitch. Both Pioneer machines could access my iTunes music libraries, with folder and playlist structures intact, and played tracks smoothly and cleanly. And from my upstairs bedroom I was able to remotely peruse my (downstairs) Mac’s iPhoto folders, viewing snapshots either one by one or in an automated slide show.
Better yet, from either the DVR-810H in my studio or the Elite deck in the upstairs room, I could browse the programs recorded on the other unit, which appeared in folderlike sub-lists on the “Now Playing” screen. Selecting a remote program transfers it to the local machine. However, depending on the quality level (bit rate) of the remote recording, content wasn’t always transferred over my network fast enough to allow me to watch uninterrupted.
For example, a 1-hour show recorded at High quality (the next to top level) required about a 10-minute head start. Otherwise, the DVR-810H would automatically pause and pop up a banner telling me to wait a few moments before pressing play again. By contrast, programs recorded at the lowest level (Basic) played smoothly from the very beginning but, of course, with lower picture quality.
Being able to use a second TiVo to record multiple shows broadcast simultaneously, but watch them from whichever room suits the moment, is a valuable perk, and the Home Media Option’s ability to turn your computer into a whole-house music and photo server is no mean trick. Long term, it’ll be well worth the upgrade’s cost.
As a DVD player the Pioneer is like — well, a DVD player. Most secondary DVD features, like chapter/time-search, subtitle, and repeat, are accessible only via the onscreen banner that pops up when you hit the remote’s Info key (this also shows title, chapter, and elapsed/remaining time in a single window). Other that that, there’s little difference from using any other player.
DVD movie quality via the Pioneer’s progressive-scan component outputs compared favorably with that of my $1,000 reference player. In direct comparisons on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (I happened to have two copies on hand), the only thing I noticed was a slightly boosted black level on the Pioneer. No big deal.
Pioneer’s DVR-810H is an elegantly integrated player/recorder that’s superbly easy and intuitive to use. It quickly began to feel indispensable — disturbingly so, when you consider how TV pervades our lives already. It isn’t cheap, even at super-store prices, but for the money you get TV-viewing flexibility and time- and place-shifting powers Captain Video himself could only dream about. Now, if Pioneer would just incorporate an HDTV tuner and high-def satellite receiver, it could rule the world.
In the Lab
DVD-VIDEO PERFORMANCE
Maximum-white level error: +1 IRE
Setup level: +7.5 IRE
Horizontal luminance response
(re level at 1 MHz)
3/4/5/6/6.75 MHz: ±0/-0.17/-0.63/-1.5/-1.8 dB
Onscreen horizontal resolution: 540 lines
In-player letterboxing: good
Component-output level error (interlaced)
(Y/Pr/Pb): +3.95/-4.5/-6.24 %
Component-output timing error (interlaced)
(Pr/Pb): +13/+15 nanoseconds
The DVR-810H's DVD test-bench playback performance was good, with the progressive-scan output looking quite fine and free of significant deficiencies, such as the color-smearing chroma-upsampling "bug." TiVo record/playback behavior through the S-video input depended on the recording mode selected. The Extreme (Fine) mode, with the highest bit rate, provided full DVD-quality horizontal resolution (540 lines) and video-encoding artifacts that were visible only on the most critical test patterns. Artifacts, especially mosquito noise, were slightly more visible in the High (SP) mode, but full resolution was preserved. The usual drop to half-horizontal resolution (270 lines) occurred with the Medium (LP) and Basic (EP) modes. The Medium mode still looked remarkably good, though a bit soft, on program material that didn't involve a lot of motion. Mosquito noise and blocking increased substantially in Basic mode, making it suitable only for situations where quality isn't as much of a concern as recording time. Sound quality was good, if not quite equal to CD, in all modes. Video and audio quality were retained in dubs from the hard drive to DVDs. —D.R.