Well I posted this in another thread, but there was no response ... so I thought I'd start a new one

Looking at getting the DMR-EX87, my father in-law bought the DMR-EX85 a few months ago and overall I thought it was a nice unit.

Anyway, I'm replacing a SD-PVR and a shitty old DVD player with the single DMR-EX87 unit and just want to confirm a few things before I go down the track of puchasing an all-in-one combo unit:

1. If I start recording from a digital channel and then want to watch a dvd, can I switch the source without interupting the DTV recording and watch a movie?
2. If I start recording from an external source (eg. foxtel) to the HDD, can I then switch to the DVD player and watch a movie ?
3. If I'm already watching a movie on the DVD player, will the timer recordings start automatically and record from DTV without me having any interruption?
4. If (even undocumented) the unit as an analogue tv tuner and a digital tv tuner then technically isn't this a twin tuner pvr? ie. would it be possible to record DTV to HDD and then switch to analogue to watch (lower quality) tv as well? The room I'm connecting this device to will have a projector and doesn't have a seperate TV tuner to watch alternate channels on.

Cheers.

To the first three questions the answer is yes you can .
For the last one it isn't a twin tuner.So you can't record digital and watch analogue or vice versa.The analogue tuner is quite poor really and a waste of time unless you like channel 31.

Well I bought one ... $699 at my local GoodGuys for the 250GB model... Firmware is 1.11 (from memory)

I'm using just a component lead set to progressive for video out to a projector and Optical Fibre out to my Sony AMP. So finally I've done away with the svideo and composite leads I had hanging from all the individual devices that were there before.

I've tested DTV broadcasts and DVD movies (both AC 5.1 and DTS audio) all sound and picture looks great (no black lines that I've noticed)...

Also, Interesting feature to play a DVD and record it to HDD ... I could use this to archive about a dozen of my younger children's movies onto the HDD so they are there on demand when they want them. You still get all of the various LP/ELP/SP compression options.
It would be interesting if they could later include a mirror image dvd duplicating function though (for non protected dvd media) from DVD -> HDD -> Blank DVD.

I'm next to try the DV copy to DVD function for my sony digital cam corder. I have a heap of digital video tapes, I'd like to archive 'as is' to DVD, this is normally a painful experience via PC utilising various software and trying to keep the original image quality uncompressed.

First thing that I did notice is that you can't hide the unwanted HD DTV channels and RADIO channels from being displayed, the best alternative is to setup a favorites group of the ones you want.