Hello all! I purchased this unit last night and it is my first dvd recorder. I want to back up my 8mm tapes and have a mini dv sony dcr-hc26 on the way to burn dvds from also. I am not planning on using it for recording tv at this point. Did a test run last night. Recorded 10 minutes of old footage. Went through the steps with a dvd-r disc, finalized, played back fine. I then went through all two hours of 8mm tape. Once the tape ended I hit stop, it said on the screen something like, "writing disc info" please wait a moment. I waited 20 minutes and then I got an error saying "disc cannot be written to or read" Something along that line. I was using a Sony DVD-R. Please point me in the right direction!
I learned this the hard way. Use a RW disk for the initial recording. RW disks do not require finalization before being able to be read. This won't guarantee no problems however, because these silly recorders do hiccup from time to time and all is lost. Once you have recorded onto a RW disk, you can then make a -R copy if you so desire by using DVD Decrypter or DVD Shrink (both free). If you want to move chapter markers and insert simple menus, I would recommend TMPGEnc Author (free trial).
Unfortunatly that is not an option. I mean yes I could record to rw but by computer is not setup for this. That is why I bought a standalone dvd recorder. Any other thoughts? thanks. Is it possible the media being bad. Like I said I did a partial one and it worked fine and when I did all two hours it choked. thanks.
I have a standalone recorder and it is absolutely worthless when using +R media. It only records to +R and +RW media. I can't tell you how many times I initially lost stuff as a result of the finalization process. That's why I only feed it +RW media now and then archive to +R media on my computer. Maybe someone else can help identify your problem.
