Changes in DVD Recorders

Industry changes might affect your decision

The DVD recorder marketplace is emerging from a period of major upheaval. An FCC mandate requires all devices with a tuner -- and that includes DVD recorders -- to now have an ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) digital tuner in advance of the shutdown of analog broadcasting, which will happen in Feb. 2009. Despite the ruling, some of the DVD recorders on retailer's shelves still have an analog tuner, not a digital one, since stores are allowed to continue to sell the older models until they are all gone.

Note that the new mandate applies only to devices with a tuner. A few new DVD recorders are skirting the mandate by including no tuners at all. Such recorders could be a bad choice if you still receive any of your TV over-the-air from an antenna, but they can be a satisfactory solution if you exclusively use a cable box or satellite-TV receiver to get your programming.

Additionally, if you get all of your TV programming from cable or satellite, the change to all-digital broadcasting might not matter very much to you. Cable and satellite TV use different technologies than over-the-air (OTA) broadcasters and are not immediately affected by the analog TV shutdown and the resulting switch to digital tuners in DVD recorders. So if you get your TV through a cable box or satellite receiver, older, analog DVD recorders -- or new tunerless DVD recorders -- could be a satisfactory solution.

Copyright protection is also becoming more of an issue. As always, you can't make copies of pre-recorded DVDs, but reports tell us that some of the latest generation DVD players have difficulty recording programming from some content providers. Those include premium services such as HBO and Starz, as well as basic services such as the Sci-Fi Channel.

The culprit here is something called CPRM (content protection for removable media). Programmers have long had the ability to insert "flags" that identify content that can either be recorded one time (for the purpose of time shifting or archiving), or in rare cases not at all. Previously, the technology to recognize and process those flags was not included in most DVD recorders; however, all current DVD recorders are now CPRM compliant. Note that this is not an issue for DVRs like TiVo or those provided by your cable or satellite provider.

In theory, CPRM-compliant DVD recorders do let you make recordings of flagged material -- at least that material which is record-once flagged. However, you are restricted as to the type of media that will work -- only CPRM-compliant DVD-RAM or DVD-RW -- and even the recording mode used. Unfortunately, it seems neither DVD recorder manufacturers nor programming providers are doing a great job informing users of these limitations, and we've seen a number of user complaints. In addition, user reports say that some recorders are afflicted with over-aggressive copy protection, preventing the recording of much protected content altogether, regardless of media used.