Black Boxes: Philips DVDR80 DVD+RW Recorder

by Charles Fulton
Winter 2003/Spring 2004

Philips, the company that brought us the first TiVo, presents the DVDR80, a well designed, standalone, living room-ready DVD+R/RW burner that is a VCR killer. With features like a Guide Plus+ program guide and basic editing, the unit will also appeal to home videographers.

The unit sports a somewhat flashy, yet sleek silver exterior. Other than a brief grinding noise heard upon power up when the unit initializes the disc mechanism, the unit is quiet. The spindle motor seems almost silent compared to some that we've heard on DVD players.

Guide Me+
The included Guide Plus+ program guide was a cinch to set up. When we turned off the unit, it found a local off-air station that had a Guide Plus+ data stream, filling in the guide and setting the unit's front-panel clock automatically. After leaving the unit to receive listings overnight, we were able to remove channels and map a channel that we viewed locally on a different channel.

Guide Plus+ is driven by the up, down, left, right and OK keys, but also uses two additional buttons, referred to as the Green and Blue buttons. The Green and Blue buttons are very dark colors on the remote and difficult to find in a dimly lit room. It is much simpler to learn Guide Plus+ navigation with some lights on and dim the lights after you become proficient at it.

You can enter the Guide Plus+ screen while watching TV or a DVD. We scheduled recordings with a single keystroke. Alternatively, if you are a subscriber to TV Guide or your local newspaper prints VCR Plus+ codes, you can enter the Plus+ codes to schedule recordings. One thing to note is that Guide Plus+ only supports broadcast and cable and not satellite systems. The DVDR80 does not include a front-panel IR blaster, but an external IR blaster (referred to as a G-LINK cable) can be attached to control a cable box. Unfortunately, satellite listings (more specifically, the channel mappings to satellite systems) are not part of the available data stream.

Burnin' Up
A red light emanates from around the disc tray when you are recording, so it is easy to tell when the unit is burning. The unit offered a display showing the time elapsed in the recording and the time remaining on the disc. The unit does not include DVR functions like pausing live TV that you would expect from a hard drive-based recorder. If the unit is recording a program, then that's the program you are watching. You can automatically place chapter marks every five minutes, although you can turn this function off with a menu option.

Break it Up
Once you have recorded some video on a rewritable DVD+RW disc, it is a simple matter to place a few finishing touches on your DVD. When playing the footage from the disc, press the FSS key (the scissors icon) to add and delete chapter marks (up to 99 per title, or up to 124 per disc). You can also change the program thumbnail that appears on the top menu and divide the current program into two titles. You cannot merge titles, however.

The recorder creates a DVD menu with a Philips background image, thumbnails for each program, the total duration of the programs, the video quality setting used during acquisition, and the date of the recording. With a nice, clear font with upper and lower-case characters, the resulting menus look much nicer than those generated by many competing burners.

TOC Editing
You can hide chapters easily, but you can still access the footage later. This is about as much as you can do in the way of editing. You also cannot move content around. Unwanted material is not deleted from the disc without erasing the entire title (for rewritable DVD+RW discs).

You can protect DVD+RW discs with valuable content from future changes, much like breaking the tab out of a videocassette. Individual titles cannot be locked while keeping the rest of the disc free for modification. The unit also includes a disc management feature that catalogs material that the unit has recorded, allowing you to easily search for recorded titles in your library of recorded DVDs.

When you have made all the changes you want, just select "Make Edits Compatible" from the disc setting screen. It took the player about five minutes to finalize the disc when we hid the commercials from a half-hour TV show that we recorded.

It's Showtime!
To our great delight, we were able to play the disc in our standard DVD players. The menu looked great and the program came up just as we expected, with very good video quality. We were even more delighted when the Dolby Digital indicator illuminated on our stereo receiver. Stereo Dolby Digital audio is ideal, as it is highly compatible with existing equipment and it takes up only a fraction of the bits that PCM-encoded audio consumes.

At the points at which we hid commercials, the player did not stumble at all, and the chapter indicator on the front panel display incremented precisely where we set the chapter marks. The DVDR80 deserves high marks for delivering compatible discs.

It Can Even Play Discs, Too
When playing purchased DVDs from our library, we found that it generally took a rather long time for the player to read discs that were not DVD+R or DVD+RW. You might also miss having an Open/Close button on the remote as well (we did). Another unusual quirk is the lack of picture scan buttons on the remote as well as on the unit-to scan through material, you have to hold down the track up or track down buttons until the picture begins to move faster.

It's a Winner!
We have to admit a slight bit of skepticism when approaching the unit, having mixed experiences with rewritable optical media in the past. However, the Philips DVDR80 handily exceeded our expectations, to the point where we wonder why anyone would want to use +R media, other than its lower cost. We found that +RW is highly compatible, does not cost that much more, and can be easily changed.

The machine has a few quirks, but, surprisingly, less of a learning curve than you might think it would. Overall, the machine is competent for what it does. Is it a VCR killer? We sure think so.

III SMART SPECS
Format: DVD+R/+RW
Dimensions (HxWxD): 3.0 x17.2 x13.3
Weight: 9 lbs.
Rear input 1: component video, analog stereo audio
Rear input 2: S-video and component video, analog stereo audio
Front input: FireWire, S-video and composite video, analog stereo audio
Digital audio output: optical, coaxial
Video outputs: component video, S-video, composite video

Company: Philips Consumer Electronics
Phone: (770) 821-2400
Web: www.consumer.philips.com
Price: $799