Pioneer DVR-640H (160 GB) DVD Recorder / HDD Recorder

Let me start out by saying that when I buy something as expensive as this, I research the heck out of it, and the Pioneer DVR-640-HS was not my first choice. I had actually chosen a Pansonic model that was a bit more expensive, but received better reviews overall and had a slightly better feature set. However, Panasonic had recently discontinued the model I had chosen in favor of a High Definition version (which I don't want or need).

Fortunately, I saved all my research and was able to quickly identify and purchase my second choice, the Pioneer DVR-640-HS.

The basic functionality of this or any other HDD DVD Recorder is that you can record broadcast television programs onto a built-in hard disk drive or to a recordable DVD (such as a DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD R, or DVD RW). You can record programs that you've stored on the hard drive to DVD, or you can watch them and erase them (IE "time shifting").

My wife and I do a lot of time-shifting, and one of the major reasons we made this purchase was to replace a failing VCR. I was also looking for an easy way to transfer old home videos to DVD for posterity. A HDD DVD Recorder seemed to be the perfect fit, and so far it has been.

Features

Recording

The recorder can record either manually or on a timer, to either the internal hard drive or direct to any supported recordable media. It has a single tuner, and can therefore record only one program at a time. You can, however, playback during recording. If you're recording to DVD, you can only play back from the HDD. If you're recording to HDD, you can play a DVD, or anything from the HDD -- including the program you are recording, a feature that is referred to as "chase play".

The recorder offers a wide variety of recording quality levels. The lower the recording quality, the less space is used on the storage medium, and the more content you can therefore store on a DVD or on the internal HDD. There are 32 manual recording quality modes, and six fixed recording quality levels. Fixed modes range from XP, which can store one hour of material on a DVD, to SEP, which stores 10 hours on a DVD.

The default setting of SP allows two hours of programming to be stored on a single DVD, and over one hundred hours on the HDD, at a quality level comparable to what you'd expect from a commercial DVD. The EP setting, which is similar in quality to what you would get from a VHS tape at the 6-hour recording mode, will allow six hours to be recorded on a DVD, or over 300 hours on the HDD. I generally use SP mode for things I plan on keeping, like a favorite movie or a dub of a home video, and EP for things I plan to watch and erase.

Playback

DVD playback is pretty straightforward, and works just like any other DVD player. I was impressed by the fact that this machine has so far been able to play every DVD I've given it, even disks that will not play on one or more of my other DVD players. This is the only DVD player in the house that has never refused to play anything.

If the DVD you're playing is not copy protected (EG if it is something you created yourself, such as on a DVD camcorder, or recorded from the unit itself), you have the option of copying the DVD to the internal hard drive. You might want to do this so that you can make copies, or do some editing.

Most of the functionality of this unit comes into play when you're playing back content from the hard disk drive. As you might expect given the substantial capacity of the HDD, this machine has a fairly rich and complex user interface, called the Disc Navigator, for organizing and accessing stored content.

Each stored program has a title which is automatically generated when the recording is made, and includes the date, time, and channel from which the program was recorded. You can change a program's title to anything you want. You can also specify a title in advance when you set up a timer recording, however this title is ignored if the program is for a daily or weekly recording.

Programs are also arranged by genre. The unit provides 9 genres which you can name and use however you wish. For example, you can create genres for "Action", "Comedy", "Drama", etc. Since I use my unit primarily to regularly record a handful of shows for later viewing, I have set up a genre for each show that I watch, and have set up my timer programs so that each show is filed into the appropriate genre automatically. When I'm ready to watch, for example, an episode of the TV series "24", I select the genre that I created for that series, called "24", in my Disc Navigator, and I'm shown all the episodes of 24 currently stored on the hard drive in the order in which they were recorded. I strongly suggest that you decide on and employ a strategy for titling and categorizing your programs early on, as otherwise you will quickly fill your hard drive with dozens or even hundreds of programs which you can't easily identify.

If you stop a program during playback, by default the player enables "resume" mode. This means that it saves your spot in the program, so that the next time you go to play it, you can pick up where you left off. If you want to start at the beginning, just press "Stop" a second time when you stop playback and resume mode will be cancelled. You can fast-forward or rewind through a program at four different speeds. One feature that seems unique to this unit is that you get sound at the slowest fast-forward speed (which is about double speed). It sounds a little funny, but is audible enough that you can follow what's going on, so if you're looking for a specific spot in the program you can find it without having to stare at the screen.

Editing

The DVR-640H offers some rudimentary editing functions that allow you to do things like cut a program into segments, and then put segments together in any order for burning to DVD. This can be used for editing home videos, or for cutting the commercials out of a movie or show on television that you want to save. You can't do any of the fancy stuff that a consumer-level video editing package for a PC could do, but it will be sufficient for most people's purposes. When I want more editing functionality that the unit provides, I just burn my unedited footage to DVD and import it into my computer's video editing program.

Although it's not considered part of the editing process per se, after burning content to DVD the DVR-640H will optionally create a menu page for your disk. There are about a dozen or so menu styles to choose from. All are professional and clean looking, but there is nothing fancy, nor is there any customization available. Be aware that the titles and thumbnails displayed in these menus are taken from the titles and thumbnails you set on the individual programs you include on the disk. You can specify what these titles and thumbnails will be, but you must do so before burning your content to disk, and your menu doesn't get created until after burning. Therefore, you must decide in advance whether you plan on creating a menu, and if so you must set up your thumbnails and titles before you start to burn the disk.

Music and Photos

The DVR-640H is capable of playing music and displaying photos supplied either on CD or DVD, or a USB device connected to the front panel. I have only tried the music playback feature, just to see it work (I'm a gadget guy). I can tell you that it works just fine with both my Lexar Media USB thumb drive, and a Sandisk 1GB SD card in a cheapo USB card reader. The unit picks up the metadata and plays Windows Media Audio (WMA) files. I haven't tried MP3, but if WMA works then so should MP3. There is no support for playlists or anything like that. It's basically like playing a CD -- you see a list of songs on your media in no particular order. You can jump to any song you want and play it immediately. When the song is over, play will continue with the next song in the list. In my case, sound quality was limited to what my TV could reproduce, but if you hook the unit up to a stereo system, you should get CD quality sound out of it.

I haven't tried photos yet, but a digital photo's resolution is many times greater than what a standard television can reproduce, so any limits on photo quality will not be due to the DVR-640H. It won't be like viewing a photo on your computer screen, but it will be as close as a TV can get.

What's Missing

The one thing that I wish this unit had that it does not is an onscreen program guide. The description of this unit on Epinions says that it includes "TV Guide Onscreen", but this is incorrect. The interface for setting up timer recording is intuitive and very easy to use, but manual.

I was also disappointed to find out that the USB port offers limited functionality. The unit is basically a computer with some specialized hardware and software added in to allow it to perform it's primary function of recording and playing back television content. The ability to plug in an external USB hard drive, either to expand the capacity of the unit or to enable content to be copied off for backup or archival purposes seems like an obvious application that is conspicuous (at least to me) in it's absence. The DVD burner does provide a serviceable workaround, and to be fair none of the other units I researched were any better (and in fact most did not even have USB ports at all) But I still think this was a missed opportunity on Pioneer's part, not to mention a waste of hardware, since most of the capabilities of the USB port are not used.

Final Words

A DVD Recorder with integrated Hard Disk Drive is one of those things that you could get through life just fine without, but that once you have one you won't remember how you got along without it. If you don't want a high-definition device (and if you can even still get it), the Pioneer DVR-640H is about the best in this family of devices that you are going to find. If you'd prefer an HD device and money is not an object, then hold off for now. I got this one for over six months ago, and units in the same class were already being discontinued at that time in anticipation of the release of HD units.