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robertjp said:

Cholly,

I have read the freakin manuals. The Panasonic manual sucks. They mention the word "satellite" one time. If I had the answers I wouldnt be asking questions. sorry. Give me a break. BP

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The Panny manual can't be much worse than the manual that came with my Sanyo recorder. Also, the recording setup process can be daunting, to say the least. I burned a coaster or two before I got the knack of things. Ransack has laid the basics out very nicely. As I said in my earlier post, think of your 811 as being a camcorder or VCR. The manual probably says something about recording from a camcorder or VCR. You'll have to either leave the 811 set to the channel you want to record or use a timer. Set up your DVD recorder to begin recording at the start of the program, and stop at the end (if you want, you can extend the end time to be sure you've recorded the entire program. You'll have to select the recording quality, keeping in mind that High Quality yields one hour of recording time on a DVD, Standard Quality gives you 2 hours, and Medium quality gives 4 hours. Don't even bother with "Basic Quality". It's just plain bad. When you're setting up to record, you'll probably be asked to name the title of your recording. That needs to be done before recording the program. You can probably assign a name to the DVD after recording (at least I can on mine). Key here is that you might be able to record more than one program on your DVD. You'd want to name each of the programs, because they will show up as separate menu items when you go to play the DVD. When you are done recording, you'll have to finalize the disk if it's a DVD-R. Once the disk is finalized, no more data can be recorded on it. If the disk isn't finalized, you won't be able to play it back on a DVD player (although you'll be able to play it on your recorder).
That's about it. The important thing to remember is that the 811 cannot control the DVD recorder, so you'll have to have the 811 set up in advance and then control the recording process from the recorder itself. I've had good results in recording from PBS-HD over the air and from HDNet. I've played the DVD's on both RCA and Panasonic players with excellent quality. Not HD, mind you, but every bit as good as most commercial DVD's.
As others have said, it does pay to have decent cables. I'm not a Monster Cable fan. They're overrated and grossly overpriced. Premium cables carrying the Philips or RCA brand names do a good job. Just stay away from the cheapies.
Good luck, let us know how you make out!

Thanks Cholly and others I have it up and running. BP

I have the Phillips DVDR75 and it has component inputs(YPbPr) you can see the product spec sheet here http://www.dvdrecorder.philips.com/index.cfm?event=SupportDVDR

I got the DVDR for xmas last year and I assumed that every DVDR had Component inputs but I checked soon after my post here and found that Philips is one of the few that have it. I dont think that it will make a big diff but it will be nice to record from a higher PQ and downgrade it to 480p

Ill be darn! Phillips has a leg up as far as Im concerned then,except for the fact hardly anyone big is going with dvd+R, most are going with -R. Thanks for the info. BP

Length of recording affects quality

I got these numbers somewhere:

HQ mode (1HR, 9.5Mpbs, MPEG2, 720x480)
SP mode (2HR, 5.1Mpbs, MPEG2, 720x480)
EP mode (4HR, 2.5Mpbs, MPEG2, 352x480)
SLP mode (6HR, 1.7Mpbs, MPEG1, 352x240)

For me, the breakpoint was 2hr 4min, the real SP max, when going from SP to EP, that the quality noticably dropped. It is unfortunate that a lot of movies come in at 2hr 10min or so. SP does produce a good result, use EP only to get it all on one recording.

I had my first sighting of dual layer (DL) DVD disks at a Wal*Mart but the price was high for a write once. But it would double the times with the right recorder.