A win for the Tech-Deprived

Cousin Edward visited yesterday and we made a combined effort at finally sorting out the DVD player/recorder. I had previously been able to record TV programmes and copy VCR tapes to the hard drive, but not been successful in burning the programmes to a DVD disk.

I had been using DVD+R disks and the handbook said that when the recording is stopped the disk will automatically be finalised. Indeed the recorder did say that the disks were being finalised; but they wouldn't play on other DVD players. We decided to ignore the messages given us by the recorder and manually finalised a disk and it worked.

A couple of tricks (did I say a couple?) for old players (old operators) when operating these machines are............. 1. There are 5 different disks available to use and each has different properties. 2. If copying a previously recorded VCR tape you must estimate how long the programme is and make a selection from different recording modes to ensure it will fit on the disk. Not like the old VCR where you bought a 750 tape which was long enough to record just about any movie; dumped it in the machine and pressed 'record'.

So now all is well and I have started transferring old Beta tapes to DVD. Works well!