Oddity Archive: Episode 276.2 - Ben’s Junk: Magnavox H2160MW9 (or, Exploring Someone’s Old DVR)
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- Опубліковано 3 жов 2024
- The tech geek equivalent of rummaging through someone’s medicine cabinet…
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DVR montage starts at 16:55
How is it that I've been watching Ben's Junk for years but only just now my mind went to the idea of "Ben's junk" and now I'm laughing like a juvenile Beavis and Butthead?
that lottery commercial is hilarious and depressing
It's a PSA warning senior citizens about potential scams found online.
@@luisreyes1963 yeah I know that’s why it’s depressing, but I still found it hilarious
22:44 I like the Red Green Show.
The guy that played Red Green (Steve Smith) is currently doing a Red Green show themed podcast, on Patreon, with one of his sons (Dave Smith), called the Possum Lodge Podcast.
Red is a national treasure here in Canada!
My dad who passed loved the Red Green show we use to watch it together.
My DVD recorder is actually a combo unit with a VHS recorder - and it belongs in my trusty old hi-fi system! It is a good old Sony RDR-VX450 DVD/VHS combo unit!
Oh why did they have to record that damn Pomplamoose Hyundai commercial! That was from 2010 because I remember that and Honda using "Holiday" from Vampire Weekend for the season. It was the Christmas of indie hipster car ads!
But hey, bonus Red Green!
This was an interesting find. Also I do hope the commercials at least end up in the Annex.
I'm hesitant to harvest the complete ad breaks--just about everything of note wound up in the montage.
If I can get a direct dump of the data, I might consider it, but I'm not sitting around transferring a bunch of mediocre ad breaks in real time.
Everything about this from the menus to the back end of the machine itself is eerily similar to those final DVD-VCR combo units Funai made in the mid 2010s, just with DVR options instead of VCR options. Even dubbing between the two formats was a feature on those that seems to be the same here (as well as it flipping you off if you dare try to record something encoded with macro vision).
Well, this unit was made by Funal(you can see the label on the back), so it makes sense that the menus look like Funai menus.
ohhhh... when I saw the video thumbnail... THIS EXACTLY. I had the MWDR16 or whatever it was. Bought two actually.EDIT: Magnavox is FUNAI I think as well as Emerson, or was.
I agree - the late '00s and early '10s are truly anti-nostalgia
It was that weird transition period between the arguably superior yet flawed days of the Y2K era and the Noughties zeitgeist and the train wreck that was the latter half of the 2010s.
All of my uploads are from DVDs captured from a Funai recorder. I had one of the first affordable Philips ones before that but it died, and you can see that it put some annoying blue dots on the left side of the screen and stopped capturing any time there was a video dropout. I have the HDMI output on the new one set to 480 as that’s the only way it will properly switch between 16x9 and 4x3 automatically when playing DVDs. I’m pretty sure it outputs DTS also. (My main player is an Oppo 4k which puts out everything in 16x9 and properly formats 4x3 material with black side bars.)
This is my first day after a short but terrible cold and my back hurts. I definitely needed one of your videos.
21:51 A rare look at an onscreen program guide from a FiOS TV service (probably Verizon). 📺
Gamut ... Gotta be word of the day... Cheers Ben from the UK
I would have loved a unit like this. My DVD recorder was stolen about a decade ago, but having a DVR as well would have been great when I was strictly Antenna. Not bad quality either. Good find Ben
Dvds start rotting away and don't last, especially maxell discs.
I'm from Connecticut and I remember those commercials.
It's been a few years since I've seen a DVD-recorder at a thrift store around here. There was a couple of years there where I was spotting at least one a month, although most throwing error codes or in rough shape. During that time, I scored a fully working Pioneer DVR-520H-S for $5 at Goodwill. I probably paid another $20 for a remote for it off eBay. The HDD had a couple of recordings off VHS tapes in what I think was Polish on it. Despite the unit being on the older side (2004), it has become my go-to DVD-recorder. It produces very nice recordings, it has nice video editing features, and has a decent TBC in it as it handles those rough VHS tapes fairly well. Importantly, it works just fine with modern 16x blank DVD-R media. I have several other old DVD-recorders from the 2005 and earlier era, and they all want 4x or 8x (or in the case of my Pioneer DVR-7000 from 2001, 1x) blank media.
Im nostalgic for everything 80's and 90's stuff
The menus and the connectors on the back are very similar to my Panasonic VHS/DVD recorder unit. Most likely there's a standard design with variations for each company's machine specification.
I bought in the 90'ies a nearly identical machine from JVC, (interface and specs look identical ) here in Belgium at the Mediamarkt. I remember there was a huge 'promotion' tower of these machines. Unfortunately it worked only well for a few years when problems with the powersupply gave more and more errors, and found out on the internet that a lot of these machines had the same fault. Luckily I was capable to copy the HDD on dvd's, but did not always check the resolution and qualiry, resulting sometimes in very bad copies. But still amusing to see local content from that period.
Hey Ben, I actually own one of these. I got it refurbished in 2012 and used it for several years until I got an updated cable box that I couldn't connect to it. Still works but just don't use it anymore.
You can definitely tell the commercials were from the 2009/10 era as they only repeat the 800 number twice. Those were the days.. Now we have to sit through the number twice, then a website, then the number again. 😖
I use a circa 2010 Toshiba DVR stand alone unit. Its made after the digital kick over as it has no tuner. I got recently in late 2022, a powered adapter to connect to a cable box to record programing from the DVR server to the Toshiba DVR and it works very good, only problem I noticed I can't get closed caption to work.
I've got the 3575H Philips model that preceded this one. I bought it back in 2007 for $300. It's still running like new. My unit came with a 160GB PATA drive. Due to its age, I decided to upgrade to a SATA drive through the use of a converter. It seems the maximum my unit can go up to is 500GB. I used ISOBuster to read the PATA drive and copy the contents off of it. If you have to ever replace the drive, you'll likely need a 512-byte sectored drive. I tried a 4k-sector drive that could emulate 512-byte sectors, but it never worked right. I dug around on Amazon till I found a new condition DVR grade WD drive. The one complaint I have on my unit is that via HDMI, the contrast is very dark. There are 2 color modes for HDMI. One is RGB, and the other is YCBCR with the only difference being that RGB is a tiny bit lighter on the contrast. Due to the darkness, I mainly use it over component video.
Regarding the last ad: the dog obviously learned to speak by watching Gilbert Gottfried too much... Or is that just my imagination working overtime? LOL.
Have you ever considered buying a programmable remote like a Logitech Harmony? You can find scripts online for most devices that people share. Would save you a lot of effort & money tracking down obscure remotes.
I suppose I could try. I've had rotten luck with universal remotes in general over the years.
@@OddityArchive You can get used ones for cheap. Since they've been around for a while, they have tons of legacy devices in their database too.
Those pseudo widescreen commercials were probably HD commercials that were just... broadcast that way in an SD channel. I used to see those pretty often back when the conversion happened.
Also yeah, fuck Pomplamoose.
OH RIGHT, I think another one of these models actually let you copy the original source video in your hard drive to a DVD-RAM (yes, RAM) disc and you could move them to your computer. I'm not sure if this is one of those units.
A Tivo Roamio OTA is mostly what I use now, but I still have several of these hooked up with upgraded hard drives (if I remember correctly 1 TB was the limit). I also have one in the box that I opened up to upgrade the firmware and then put away as a spare. I've been meaning to transfer over Betamax tapes going back to '76 to DVD, but I've only done a few. Those I have done came out pretty well.
If you want to attach the 3.5'' HDD to a computer a *powered* SATA-to-USB cable should be enough.
About recovering the deleted recordings, you could try something like Recuva, which is not forensic-grade, but should do the trick if there is no overwriting of bytes (in that case, it's unlikely you'll recover anything anyway) and is much easier to use.
Well, I don't know about encryptions or recovering deleted files, but in my experience, a laptop drive only needs a USB to SATA adapter.
Seeing the menu on this unit you can tell it was made by Funai. I have Magnavox and Toshiba DVD recorders and a Toshiba VCR/DVD recorder combo, all of which have similar menus.
From what I've been hearing lately, it seems like a good chunk of these electronics are just rebadged Funai--which is kinda amusing, as I've never had a decent Funai-badged piece of gear.
I'm so glad I'm not the only one that could not stand Pomplamoose.
I bought mine new in 2013. I wanted another Pioneer HDD/DVD but they were gone. This was the last of it's kind. It has a digital tuner and I still record daily. It is far less capable than my Pioneers and doesn't multitask. You ask why archive to HDD then to DVD? To EDIT and assemble various clips to fit on a DVD!
I have a similar unit made by Philips with a 160gb drive. The video interface is identical. Mine touts an atsc tuner, and can confirm that while it can record digital OTA broadcasts, they'll be recorded in letterboxed SD.
The way I use these HDMI output DVD recorders is to connect VCR or laserdisc and capture the HDMI output directly at 480p.
As I understand it, not all of them will pass through an upscaled signal, only upscale material that the unit itself is playing. My Philips unit definitely doesn't.
@@CantankerousDave weird, so do you end up with a postage stamp output unscaled? The sonys toshibas and Panasonic's I've tested just pass thru input to output scaled up to whatever the unit supports but I prefer to stay as close to native resolution of the source.
I still have my old Sony RDR-GX330 Model DVD Recorder from 2006 that I bought at "Sears" at the time and it works as well! Often transferred my old VHS recording to DVD-Rs and record Movies, TV Shows and other programs through my DirecTV Satellite Receiver Box during the 2000s and 2010s. Would have love to have another unit with HDD, HDMI input and records BD-Rs and DVD-Rs as well if they are affordable enough to find online! Amazing to find a few KCET & KVCR Los Angeles/San Bernardino recordings here directly from Verizon FiOS Box.
I remember seeing one of these at a thrift store and almost bought one so that I could record me playing my old video games. They wanted $20 so I decided not to, after seeing the price of it on eBay I really wish I picked it up. HDD to USB adapters are dirt cheap and a laptop drive like that wouldn’t need an external power adapterv
I think the reason why these dvrs are so expensive, are probably because they require special subscription services to actually work. I have a Toshiba dvd player/ series 2 Tivo device downstairs that has a lifetime subscription, which is absolutely mandatory for recording programs because Tivo doesn't offer service for those older services anymore. Oh, and my device mostly had crappy TLC reality shows, AHS, and Son's of Anarchy reruns.
This looks like it would be good to record analogue media like a Nintendo or old vhs’s. Recording composite on a PC is kind of sht show.
@astro_plane Agreed about the PC footage. Needs S-Video at the bare minimum, ideally RGB.
@AtlantaCommercials96. For the same price as an old fleabayed personal DVR, you could get a ClonerAlliance box and some high-capacity flash drives and go full HD. I'm kind of baffled at the high price of used, standard-def DVR's--unless there's some kind of roundabout hardware hack that I'm unaware of.
I 100% support your hatred of Pomplamoose.
"over-aggressive/timebase corrector" sounds like they could be industrial music lyrics
This would be a neat low cost recorder (if found at a thrift store) for retro games - get a SNES > S video cable and record while you play and dump the file to your computer.
Pretty sure that's how AVGN, etc. used to do it.
2009 what a time to be alive
Still amazed by the way digital copies stay so clean over a decade+. Sure ain't VHS.
The FMS guy is now selling cheap jewelry over FB.
The amount of hours comes out to about 650 days, so two years straight time wise. Could be right.
Also Ben, what type of hard drive is it? I might have a cable here to use with it to connect to your PC.
Looks to be a normal SATA. Haven’t tried to remove it (didn’t wanna potentially screw up the DVR contents before I could dig through it).
@@OddityArchive If you want I have a SATA to USB cable here I'd be happy to give you.
Think it's gonna need one of those docking stations. I've already got a SATA-to-USB cable to get stuff off more modern hard drives. Thanks for the offer though. :)
@@OddityArchive No problem!
I'd love to see you try to find an old TiVo next
18:09 This seems less like Peloton and more like a money-laundering operation, judging by the quality of the ad
19:34 This reminds me of the old upside-down tomato planter my parents had when I was little
20:01 They went from being part of the resistance against post-grunge to, along with every indie pop one-hit wonder of the time, joining the likes of Saliva on the "restored 20s/30s movie palace in a suburb" circuit
20:12 Not what I expected with the latest Local Access Alert discovery.
20:25 No wonder millennials are waiting for a housing market crash...
20:34 That quip reminds me of when my local PEP, WBZ, used to air a Empire Carpet sponsor tag after RMTs.
20:46 "As well as bad green screening". And that quip just makes me imagine an Analog Horror video doing that. "DO NOT GO OUTSIDE. YOU SHALL PERISH IN THE LIGHT. And women's designer wear is 65% off at JCPenney!"
21:08 That guitarist is simultaneously trying to avoid breaking out into "What I Like About You" and wishing they were playing "I Can Only Imagine"
Who in their right minds hates Pomplamoose? 😅 I've been a fan of theirs right from the beginning. I went from UA-cam pioneer Ysabella Brave, right to Nataly Dawn.❤
I think it was a mix of forced exposure to this whole "twee" movement going on in Denver in the mid-2000's (breathy-voiced women, usually with ukeleles!) and an aversion to that particular vocal style that keeps me off their music.
@@OddityArchive Fair enough. Her French songs are superb.
Ben, can you encode/record 4.0 audio onto a DVD with that deck? I learned how to "decode" SQ Quadraphonic LPs into 2 separate stereo files.
No. 1 or 2-channel only.
Pomplamoose? Is that the band's name or the shite genre of dorky musicians making dorky music from that pat decade? I agree with you. I hate that crap. Also had to watch that Caddyshack commercial twice to realize they were pop corn kernels and not large, yellow turds.
Pomplamoose is the bomb!