Technical Help Please

[jayne lee wilson]

Yes - sorry if I caused any confusion, MPEG-2 is of course a backwards compatible extension of MPEG-1/Layer 2 which adds multichannel VBR and some extra bitrates/sampling rates. Writing "MPEG2" for mp2 has become one of my shibboleths...

MPEG 1, audio layer 2, a.k.a. mp2, surely?

[gurnemanz]

There's quite a variety of TV recording kit available now. We manage with PVRs which have just hard drives, and the newest one can take an external drive. Some people like to have DVDs and maybe even Blu Ray as well. Very recently I was talking to a colleague who was very enthusiastic about a gadget which I think he said also did transfers from Video Tape (presumably VHS!)

Why is a gadget needed? When I phased out my VHS and replaced it with a Panasonic HD/DVD recorder there was only one tape I wished to transfer - some 20 year old footage of our children. I just connected the VHS player's scart to the AV3 input of the new device and pressed record.

I find it useful to have more than one way of recording TV. Sky Plus box is convenient but is only for Sky channels and I don't have SKY HD. I need the DVD/Hard Drive recorder to record German TV/Radio from the Astra satellite receiver. I also have an external hard drive attached straight to the Panasonic TV which has a massive capacity and is good for recording Freeview in HD.

[Dave2002]

Why is a gadget needed? When I phased out my VHS and replaced it with a Panasonic HD/DVD recorder there was only one tape I wished to transfer - some 20 year old footage of our children. I just connected the VHS player's scart to the AV3 input of the new device and pressed record.

I find it useful to have more than one way of recording TV. Sky Plus box is convenient but is only for Sky channels and I don't have SKY HD. I need the DVD/Hard Drive recorder to record German TV/Radio from the Astra satellite receiver. I also have an external hard drive attached straight to the Panasonic TV which has a massive capacity and is good for recording Freeview in HD.

I didn't say a gadget is needed. I did write that some people seem to like them, and some people find them useful. Not everyone likes connecting wires up, even if it is easy to do. I was merely pointing out that there is quite a variety of different kinds of kit, and that different people may have different requirements and find different types of kit more or less useful. In the conversation with my friend with the tape/DVD device another party wanted him to do a conversion. Some people either don't have the equipment or are complete technophobes.

What our OP here (Petrushka) wants is up to him. I was simply pointing out that there is quite a wide range of possible options.