I recently bought a Panasonic DVD recorder. Every time I record something either from the T.V. or from my VHS tapes and tried to play it back it chews up the disc and makes them useless. My first question is, If I take out the disc without finalizing it and then put it back in, is that something I shouldn't be doing? I've tried 4 different brands of disc. Memorex -R. Maxell +RW Fuji -R Verbatim +R I only had the thing for 6 weeks. I took it back to Best Buy and they shipped it back to Panasonic and they said they couldn't find anything wrong with it. I waited 3 weeks for it to come back. They eventually said they updated the firmware. I tried it when I got it back home and it sounded worse then when I sent it in for repairs. The first disc I tried after recording something on it, it chewed it up.
I'm not sure what you mean by "chewed up." The only physical contact with a disc in any drive/player/recorder is at the spindle and clamp chuck. The pickup head cannot and should not ever touch the disc at all.
That may not have been the best word to use. It doesn't physically chew it up. When I put the disc back in the recorder it makes louder then normal noises. Something like when your trying to start a car with a low battery. It sounds like it's struggling. Does not sound very good (That's where the word "Chew" comes from). Then after about 8 seconds of this I will get a message that either there is no disc in there or it can't read the disc. The disc is then useless even if I put it in my DVD burner on my computer or laptop DVD player.
Finalizing the disc writes the table of contents to the disc. An unfinalized disc cannot be played in any other drive or player, but it should be able to be played in the original recording drive. It sounds as though your Panasonic needs to have the discs finalized before they are removed from the recorder. Once you finalize the disc, no more video can be recorded onto it; so only finalize discs that are close to "full." Once finalized, all drives/players/recorders should be able to read the discs.
Thanks for your reply. So in other words this brand new DVD recorder is not working right. So if I start a project I have to complete it before I do anything else. Last night I was trying to put some old golf videos on DVD. I have a few hours on VHS tapes but I wanted to also tape a show that was on TV last night. I took out the DVD that had only 20 minutes of the golf video on it so I can put in a new disc to tape the TV show. So apparently I can't do that then. Although, when I take the disc out it gives me the option of finalizing it or not. It tells me I cannot play it on any other players and that I can finalize it later. Which is all fine and dandy. When it says "I can finalize it later" I assumed I can take it out and put it back in later to do this. The reason I'm asking this is that I want to take the recorder back to the store for repairs. I just wanted to make sure that what I was doing wasn't causing the problem and I wasn't supposed to be taking out an unfinalized disc. This is my first DVD recorder so I didn't know what to expect. Just like my old VHS recorder, I would like to have certain shows together. Sports with sports. Comedy with comedy and Science with Science programs on individual discs. But with this recorder I'll have to have a mixture of everything on one disc. That just doesn't make sense.
You should be able to take out an unfinalized disc and put it in later to add recordings and finalize it later. All the Panasonic recorder manuals I've read state this. If your recorder cannot, then something is wrong. One option is DVD-RW discs if your Panasonic will record to them--early ones will not be able to. You can "finalize" then "unfinalize" rewritable discs because the table of contents can be overwritten later.
Thanks for that information Joe. It will come in handy if I decide to take this back to the store once again. I'm still under warranty until the 29th of August for parts and labor. Of course a very strange thing happen the other day. I was able to put all those useless disc that were supposedly destroyed by this machine back in the recorder and they all played fine. No ugly sounds. The only problem I had was with the DVD+RW disc. I wanted to delete one of the titles on it and then that ugly sound came back while I was doing that and made that disc unrecognizable in that player. I popped that same disc into my other DVD player and it played fine. ?????? Other then that, it looks promising though. It will probably work fine until August 30th. Thanks again for your assistance.
