Hi All,
I have a friend who I still take VHS video tapes with me when I visit.
It seemed to me I'd be better off taking a USB thumb drive with video on it, rather than VHS tapes.
I can buy 64G USB thumb drives for about $30 from MSY now, and a Thompson STB with USB record is $39 from K-Mart now. (Just btw the Thompson USB STB is about the size of a VHS cassette.)
The Thompson STB records *.mts files, which can be played by VLC, turned into DVD's by Nero 7 onwards, and even be played by other PVR's like the Telefunken 500G PVR also sold by K-Mart for $149.
Anyway I trialled a Thompson STB to see how it worked and eventually bought quite a few of them so I have more than an "heir plus a spare" situation. I need to be sure I can continue to use them for a reasonable period of time, including maybe unexpected failures.
On my tests the Thompson STB's work quite well once they have about the right signal level fed into them. (Two lights and above on the Jaycar digital TV signal strength meter.)
However, I did find using a cheap MSY HDMI cable that they self interfered from the MSY el-cheapo HDMI cable. (I'm in a somewhat dodgy signal strength area, and this may not be an issue in a stronger signal strength area.) The Thopmson STB worked well enough with a better quality HDMI cable, but it worked best of all with the standard yellow-red-white AV cable.
I ended up using the yellow-red-white AV outputs instead of the HDMI output.
Anyway, I think these Thompson STB's combined with a fairly cheap 64G USB drive make quite a cheap way of transferring video about geographically, either house to house or room to room.
I store the Thompson video on my PC hard drives as the 64G drive fills up, and don;t find the 64G size is too small for my purposes. The 64G drive holds about 30 hours of video.
The Telefunken 500G PVR's also seem to have some good features for not a lot of money.
However, it is important to ring the Telefunken help line and get the latest firmware sent to your email address, since the firmware supplied out-of-the-box has bugs in it and is out-of-date. The first thing top do is upgrade the Telefunken firware before doing anything else.
The 500G Telefunken PVR's seem to work quite reliably with the updated firmware, based on the two examples I have bought. They are twin tuner, but will only record one program at a time.
They will play most video file formats like wmv, flv, mpg, mts etc from the front USB drive which I think is quite a useful feature.
I'm planning to buy another two of them, once my local K-Mart stores re-stock the Telefunken's.
Ross