A VCR for my parents
March 6, 2012 1:24 PM   Subscribe

I need a VCR that can record with an HDTV.

My parents have a VCR that is pre-digital, and therefore can't record from cable since they went to HD (and their VCR's getting pretty old anyway). They'd like to be able to record things from TV (and don't like the idea of a Tivo-type solution), and watch VHS tapes, of which they have LOTS. Problem is, Amazon seems to have a limited supply of VCR's, and they seem to get bad reviews. Can anyone recommend a good model VCR (or VCR/DVD combo since that seems to be all anyone sells) that can record from HD cable?
posted by unreason to Technology (14 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
What sort of device are they using to get their HD signal/ what sort of outputs does their TV have?
posted by brainmouse at 1:26 PM on March 6, 2012


Any VCRs will work with any HDTV as long as they both have composite video jacks (the little yellow plugs). That should be true of any VCR made in the last 30 years. And your cable box will need one as well- that's actually the bigger question. Very new cable boxes might only output HD, but I doubt that's the case. And you could probably ask the cable company to have one cable box for the TV and one for the VCR.

If you're asking whether the VCR will record HDTV, then the answer is no.
posted by thewumpusisdead at 1:29 PM on March 6, 2012


Response by poster: It's ok if it doesn't record in HD, they just need it to record. Input into the HD set works fine, but recording from the cable box isn't working. I understood that you needed a digital converter box to record to an analog VCR, is that not correct?
posted by unreason at 1:45 PM on March 6, 2012


thewumpusisdead has the gist of it

I'm suspicious of whether whatever solution you work out will be any simpler than just forcing your parents to use a DVR.

Best case would not be to have a separate STB (set top box, the cable box) for the VCRand TV, as this would be insanely complicated for anyone, let alone the elderly, to maintain. Instead, any cable provider will give you an SD STB that will have composite out. This you can plug into the composite in on your VCR, and most VCRs (or at least some) will have a composite out, and this can go to your television.


This, of course, will result in a total loss of HD quality, but there's no solution there.


You could easily plug a VCR into the HDTV and just not have it record cable, but I don't think that's what you want.
posted by Patbon at 1:45 PM on March 6, 2012


So basically the idea of the above is to abandon HD Television in favor of SD (but still digital) television.
posted by Patbon at 1:47 PM on March 6, 2012


No, the cable box should BE the digital converter. The yellow composite video jack is an analog signal. If you're having trouble outputting from the cable box to the VCR (and the yellow plug is going from cable box to VCR), then it might be because the cable box can only output to either HD or SD but not both. If that's true, you'd either need to get a new cable box just for the VCR, or you'd need to set up the cable box to output to SD when you wanted to record. That might involve going into the settings and changing it, or it might involve actually unplugging the TV to make it output to the VCR.

At that point, though, I think you'd be better off recording any future stuff to a DVR box and just using the VCR for play only, and not for recording.
posted by thewumpusisdead at 1:54 PM on March 6, 2012


Once you get the HD decoder to VCR signal working, you'll find a nearly endless supply of VCRs super cheap at a nearby Goodwill store. Invest in a cheap programmable remote because (1) most of the VCRs from Goodwill will likely not come with one (2) your folks will not need to learn to use a new remote when (3) the Goodwill VCRs might not last very long and you have to buy the next one.
posted by punocchio at 2:16 PM on March 6, 2012


It's more complicated than just hooking up yellow-to-yellow to record video; when the cablebox is turned to an HD channel, the non-HD outputs are probably solid black, or has a warning that says "to view this HD channel contact your cable provider". That's why you probably have the same channel on channel 4 and channel 494: the classic old-number is formatted for SD, the high number is formatted for HD, and there's no simple way to convert them. Realize, the HD stream is encoded digital with several various formatting options: there's no "picture" to record until the HD TV decodes it. To downconvert from HD to SD, you need a rather expensive box to figure out the format, convert the digital stream with the wide aspect ratio to an analog stream with the old TV aspect ratio, which you'll have to set to say whether you want it cropped or letterboxed and so forth. It may depend on the cable company -- maybe there are cable boxes out there that can push analog and digital of the same channel at the same time, but my limited experience is that HD channels are blank on the analog output.

The reason the tivo-like solution is so popular is that it IS all digital and there's no finagling how to get old equipment to talk to the other pieces. Quite often I have hated the fact that I have no offline storage option with our DVR, but it does do better than my VCR did, because it knows when shows are on and so forth.
posted by AzraelBrown at 2:21 PM on March 6, 2012


Get them a TiVo. No solution that includes the VCR is going to involve less faffing about on their part, or less remote tech support on your part.

My parents are really, really tech-averse, and had spent decades using a VCR, almost exclusively for recording from the TV. They were resistant to the idea of a DVR -- on-screen menus rather than mechanical buttons -- but bought one to go with their HD television, and the learning curve was surprisingly fast, for a box with a much less intuitive interface than a TiVo, especially once I sorted out the equivalent of season passes for the things they wanted to record.

Get one with a big enough drive for them to not worry about storage space (and set it not to delete the recordings they explicitly choose to make) and keep the VCR for playback only. Pick up a backup VCR from a thrift/pawn store -- you'll find perfectly functional models that were high end in their day, and better than any still made today. That's for when the current one breaks, just so you have some hardware at hand for any recordings that you may eventually want converted to digital.
posted by holgate at 6:16 PM on March 6, 2012


If you're dead-set, then you'll need to hook up some kind of connection from the cable box to the VCR, and as AzraelBrown says, your parents will need to use the SD channel numbers for recording. Which is potentially a recipe for a lot of blank recordings.
posted by holgate at 6:23 PM on March 6, 2012


Chiming in to suggest going with a DVR, particularly if your parents' cable company offers an HD box that doubles as a DVR (like Comcast). They (Comcast) tend to oversimplify DVR settings/parameters, so your parents should be fairly comfortable with recording programs, if they've figured out the on-screen guide.
posted by kuanes at 4:16 AM on March 7, 2012


Response by poster: One problem with getting a Tivo is that my parents when they record want to keep things permanently. They don't like the idea of the show/movie being on a hard drive that eventually will break/have to be erased to make way for new stuff.
posted by unreason at 4:55 AM on March 7, 2012


Video tape wears out eventually too. But I understand the sentiment. With the TiVo, you have the option to "Save To VCR", with downscaling, but that involves playing the show/movie; or you could set up a computer to pull content off with Auto Transfer.

I suppose you could look at a DVD recorder with an ATSC tuner, or this combo HD/DVD recorder, though the reviews cast doubt on its longevity.
posted by holgate at 9:24 AM on March 7, 2012


If the issue is HD stations not being output over the composite output of the cable box, then you can buy a HDMI to composite converter as a last resort. You might have to combine that with a HDMI splitter/doubler of some sort if you don't have a spare output. That should allow the VCR to record anything, but the issue then becomes how do you get the cable box to change to the right channel for a scheduled program? If they are okay with manually changing the channel at the right time then this should work, but the result would be something much more cumbersome than a DVR.
posted by Rhomboid at 4:40 AM on March 8, 2012


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