Magnavox HDD and DVD Recorder – H2160MW9
- DVD Recorder with Hard Drive
- Single-Disc Player
- It Plays DVDs
- ATSC/NTSC/clear QAM
- Dolby Digital via digital audio out or HDMI
Product Description
DVD Recorder with Hard Drive with MP3 player.Single-Disc Player.Virtual Surround Sound For Movie Sound Experience… More >>
Magnavox HDD and DVD Recorder – H2160MW9
I needed a tv recorder, but I didn’t want to spend $1000 over 5 years for a monthly service. This works like a vcr, and since I have a satellite receiver I can only record one channel at a time. This is rarely a problem for me. It records to a hard disk, and it has worked every time. It won’t record in HD, but since I have a small HD tv, the recordings look almost like they are in HD from where I sit to watch it. I haven’t tried the DVD recording feature, but it is nice to know I could save programs or movies on dvd’s. It plays every dvd I have tried without complaints. In short, it does everything I wanted, and I bought it refurbished.
Rating: 5 / 5
What can I say other than I don’t see how my wife and I ever got along without it. We are early risers so naturally it’s early to the sack. We were missing a lot and I mean a lot of shows we liked because they came on after we went to bed. Now with this recorder we can record all of the shows we were missing before and… now this is the best part… I have “The Power”, well sometimes I have “The Power”, most of the time my wife has “The Power.” By that I mean we don’t have to listen to the blathering commercials. I did set the scan ahead feature to one minute and the recall to 30 seconds so that way we can blow through the garbage and worst case scenario we have to struggle through that gecko and his “pip, pip, cherrio” for only 30 seconds, tops. If we like the show we can burn it to a DVD and save it. This is the best invention since TV and I’m wondering why this wasn’t invented right along side TV. I’ll never be without one again. I liked it so much I bought three more and gave them to family at Christmas. I know cable and satellite have them, but I quit subscribing to satellite a several years ago before these were prevalent and wouldn’t waste my money on satellite or cable to get one of these just to be held hostage with crap programming of 200 channels and nothing is on. Now when we go through our 18 digital over the air channels and when “nothing is on” we can watch NCIS, CSI, 2-1/2 Men, Idol and all the other stuff we were missing before, at a time we choose with no commercials.
Rating: 5 / 5
I spent more than three hours to test this unit to do the timer recording through Time Warner cable digital box, it failed. Called Magnavox tech support ( you may reach them easily), they confirmed when you connected a digital cable box, you could only record whatever the digital cable box was playing. While recording, you cannot watch another channel and cannot turn off the digital cable box which means if you want to record one show in the early morning, you have to leave your cable box on and stick with the channel you want to record for the entire night. Magnavox tech support also confirmed if I disconnected the digital cable box or connect this unit to the wall first, the timer recording would work perfectly though you could not record digital TV programs. But it’s not meaningful to me any more, so I returned it.
Rating: 1 / 5
This is a great unit. No media is necessary. Just record to the hard drive or dvds. Pause, rewind and fast forward past commercials during live TV. I have an antenna and the tuner picks up all channels near me. My only concern is how long will it operate problem free? Hopefully a long time. It is cheaper at [...]. where I bought mine.
Rating: 5 / 5
The Magnavox H2160 is the only game in town. After having a DVR with DVD read/write as the storage mechanism (which recently gave up the ghost), it is so much better to have 160MB of HDD storage without having to mess with discs in and out. We use it to record programs that are not convenient for us to watch, then play them back – after which we usually just erase the program.
If we do want to save a program for posterity, we can easily dump it (oops, I mean dub it) onto a DVD+-R or +-RW. Works flawlessly.
Performance of the unit is very good – not HD of course, but still a good quality picture. Setting up recording time is straight forward and works well. Good flexibility in configuration with the built-in Tuner – I hook this up to cable box plus raw cable to be able to watch 1 show while recording another. The DVD player works very well with commercial DVDs. Some problems matching the Aspect Ratio to fit the screen on my TV, haven’t yet figured out how to solve this.
A limitation is the User Guide – hard for the uninitiated user to get a feel for how to use the separate HDD and DVD features – the AVS Forum “thread” on this unit is a great resource to figure out how to use this unit’s great capabilities:
[...]
No other maker has an HDD anywhere near the price, or without requiring a monthly fee for usage (e.g. TiVo). I’m giving this unit 5 stars in spite of limitations noted because there is no one else with a product that comes close to what this unit can do for the price.
Rating: 5 / 5