JVC HM-DH40000U VHS / S-VHS playback VCR

HD is still in its early acceptance stage. If you are an early adapter and have HD at home, you probably miss the convenience you had with Standard Definition service of being able to time shift programs and record your favorite films and shows on your VCR. Of course, by today's digital standards, VHS tape leaves much to be desired with all it's low resolution, video noise, and blurry color. But the convenience!!! If you've got the dough, you can rent or buy an HD Tivo like device from some cable or satellite providers. But for the most part, the HD recording capability is limited to around 10-15 hours of programming although the quality is as good as the original program coming in off the feed.

For a couple of years, there have been VCR's that record the MPEG2 bitstream on a fine grained special VHS stock in an expensive modified VHS type machine. These are called D-VHS and look like an upscale VHS deck. However, outside appearances are about the only similarity between these two formats. Regular VHS records a reduced bandwidth analog "color under" signal complete with all kinds of degradation to the original standard definition broadcast signal. Colors are drastically reduced in resolution (spatially) and luminance is about half bandwidth. Noise is an added "feature" too.

This might look OK on your 28" analog TV set but blow that up on a large HDTV and it is completely unwatchable. DVHS on the other hand records everything coming in the datapipe from your HD digital feed (cable or satellite). There are some caveats here you should be aware of though. A full bandwidth uncompressed high definition video signal has enormous data density and is so huge in bandwidth that it is never broadcast that way. MPEG2 compression is used to compress the data and make it of manageable size to fit down the narrow transmission pipe of a broadcast channel. Fortunately, care is usually taken to use decent compression hardware so the end user will hardly ever notice blocking or other compression artifacts. That compressed signal is available on most HD cable boxes or satellite receivers on the Firewire port (IEEE 1394 or iLink are other names for the same thing), usually on the rear of the box. This is the compressed data that can be used to reconstruct the original gorgeous High Definition signal is all its incredible detail and beautiful color. And that Firewire port will mate to the family of D-VHS machines so you as the consumer can record your HD programs and play them back with the same quality they were originally delivered to your HD TV. Now isn't that cool?

Once I heard about this format, I knew I would eventually have to get one. Recordable HD-DVD is still a ways off while the manufacturers and the program providers argue about copy protection and security. In the meantime, for a few hundred bucks, you can get a D-VHS machine and start time shifting and recording your favorites from your HD feeds.

I recently got me a JVC HM-DH40000U. I purchased on line from Amazon.com for a mere $389.00 . I work in the video industry and we master to professional HD tape. A pro HD VCR costs around $65,000. But that records with very little compression, has huge editing features and other rugged design features no consumer in their right mind would need or be able to afford. So $389 for a consumer HD recorder is simply an amazing thing in my book.

Connecting up

A D-VHS machine requires a Firewire connection to record HDTV. You cannot expect a device as cheap as this to have the complex circuitry necessary to do MPEG2 compression on raw HD video. The firewire port feeds a reduced bandwidth compressed signal direct from the feed so your inexpensive machine does not have to do any fancy data processing to make a recording. This is how this machine can be so affordable. On the D-VHS is a 4 pin Firewire connector. Your cable box may have the larger 6 pin Firewire connector so make sure you get the right cable to do your interconnect.

The output of this D-VHS machine is only available as Y/Pb/Pr or component analog. There is no DVI port so be ready for this. You can either cable the 3 wires directly to your display device, or to an AV receiver with component analog switching, or you can buy an external HD analog component switch box to route your output to the display. Be prepared.

A D-VHS machine also makes a dandy VHS or S-VHS recording so you can connect up all the cables you used to have on your old analog VHS or S-VHS to do that.

Audio in can be either Firewire input embedded in the bitstream or via analog R+L cables. Audio output can be either analog L+R cables or an optical Toslink cable.

Tape Stock

D-VHS stock may be hard to come by in your local stores as this is a limited market product. There are several vendors on line who sell at a good discount so you should be able to buy stock for around $7 per 5 hour tape. Not a bad deal. I found some locally in a consumer electronics store (Electronics Expo) but they were $15 per tape. I bought two because I was in a hurry to test my new toy but will buy from now on from the on line sources.

Test Spin

The real test is in the viewing. Operating this unit will take me a while to learn all the menu functions. I found that to access the iLink (Firewire) input, you select channel I-1 which is below channel 2 on the channel selector. You have to got through the menus and select all the right modes. If you are techno-phobic, stay away. If you are techno-philic, you will love this machine for all the mode selections and for the quality it delivers. You MUST use D-VHS stock only to record in HD and you MUST select the iLink input to get an HD signal in. What I do is prerecord a program on my HD-DVR. Then when I have time, I cue it up to the beginning and press record on the D-VHS, then play on the DVR and just let it run until it's done. I know I can preprogram a lot of this but haven't got the hang of it all just yet. I'll amend this review once I've got all the programming stuff figured out.

The results are very good. HD program images are transparent. There are no added artifacts or degradations in the image from what came over the cable initially. Just beautiful images and full surround sound. My first recording of a movie I saved on my DVR played back flawlessly on the D-VHS tape. I took the tape to work and looked at it on another D-VHS machine on a 100" projection screen and it looked INCREDIBLE there too. A worthy side by side comparison with our $65,000 relatively uncompressed signals off a D5 machine. I was literally blown away and smiling ear to ear with the possibilities and the image quality. WOW!!!!!

Conclusion

D-VHS is not for everyone. If you already have HDTV and have the patience and aptitude to read and understand the instruction manual this may be just what you have been looking for. You must be ready to learn a complex device, you must have a working Firewire port that can deliver the proper signal, and you just may find this to be one of the coolest consumer toys out there.


UPDATE: July 18, 2005. Since I wrote this several months ago, digital copy protection has been more widely adopted by broadcasters and cable providers. This has made it almost impossible to record anything off the air or off a cable feed. So in my experience, I am no longer able to record from my HD DVR to the D-VHS to archive movies or shows in HD. Sorry folks, but this is a fact of life. The FCC has mandated this due to pressure from content providers to protect their properties. I can still record movies and shows on the DVR but to make a copy to tape, the signal is blocked by the Firewire equivalent to HDCP protocol which is the copy protection mandated by the FCC. Here's a quote from the digiupdate.com website located at url http://www.digiupdate.com/G002_DVI_HDMI_and_HDCP.html#_Toc64160515

"Firewire has its own version of content protection, known as DTCP or "5C". Hollywood seems to prefer DVI/HDCP connections over Firewire/DTCP connections because DVI would be impractical to record even if you could break the protection."