Lite On LVW-5045 (160 GB) DVD Recorder

I have had the unit for 6 months now.

Let's begin with a player that has a downloadable firmware upgrade so you don't have to call the company, explain why you want an upgrade and then have to either take it to their shop or send it to them and wait 2 weeks. So it already had bonus points for making my life easier. Though there seems to be an issue with the 197 firmware as far as its handling of dolby digital signal. Sometimes it outputs it as plain stereo. Though DTS always works fine.

Time Shift: I have three kids and I can't tell you how many times I've been watching something only to have them need me for something, or simply making to much noise and I have to go ask them to keep it down, only to have missed some of what I was watching. (I'm still waiting for the build your own light saber to replay so I can figure out how to set the correct power output on the laser, because right now it just fires a beam through stuff). Anyway I digress.

but the real area that this shines for me is the all write technology. It will burn to cd as well as dvd media. Will make vcd and svcd (if you don't know what that is check out http://www.dvdrhelp.com) and so I can use just regular cd-r media. which as I said I have kids and so If I want to record frosty the snowman for them to watch, I can snag a 30 cent cd-r disc and burn it to vcd or svcd for them to play in the family room, instead of wasting a dvd-r for it.

The best feature I really really enjoy. How many times have you set something to record and come in during recording and want to watch it, but you have to wait til the recording is over if you want to watch it from the beginning. Not anymore. its really sweet. Walk in 15 minutes into recording Stargate SG-1 and just hit a button and watch it from the beginning while it still records it. all I have to say is "Sweeet!!!"

If a burn goes awry you can normally just hold down the power button on the unit itself and it will shut down. Though upon turning the unit back on you'll find two things. 1. it will go through its improper shutdown screen. 2. you'll want to get the disc out, otherwise the system will sit there trying to read it for a bit of time.

There was one occasion recently Were the power flickered out and back on during a burn and I had issues with burning after that. I took the unit apart and took the the 160GB seagate Ultra ATA hard drive out and hooked it up to my PC. It uses a FAT32 partition with a 64 cluster size. I guess when the power went out it it caused a size mismatch issue. I repaired the issues with partition magic and put it back in the unit to have happy days again. Also I should note all content is accessible. So in a case of the unit having issues you can always snag the drive and get what you want off of it. I should note that doing this could possibly void the warranty.

As far burning discs, It doesn't really care for TDK DVD media, but really seems to like Maxell. It also burns DVDs up to 8x.

The unit can also easily be made region free with a simple key sequence, so for those of us that want movies from a different region, such as in the case of "Robin Hood: Men In Tights" which is released in England on DVD, but not here in the states. It handles the PAL/NTSC conversion pretty well with a little pixelation at points.

So after 6 months I'm still very happy with my purchase