I'm probably going to sink my hard earned funds into a Tosh DMR-EX99V but I would very much appreciate a small bit of help before I do!
Welcome to the forum.
Firstly though, the EX99 is a Panasonic product not a Toshiba unit.
I've had a Sony RDR-HXD710 HDD DVD recorder for several years, one that I transferred over 90 family VHS tapes via the HDD onto about 20 DVDs for each of my 3 daughers plus a set for me. HOWEVER they almost all freeze and pixelate when being played back on all our PCs and DVD players! They are a little better on the small TV DVDs.
I've spoken to Sony Customer Services who told me to change to different DVD_Rs (+ to -) and also sent me round and round the houses with other suggestions. I've reburnt the complete set (x4) AGAIN and the problem still exists....hours and hours and hours! The copies on the Sony HDD play and look perfect.
Exasperated, I wrote to the Sony CEO in the UK and received a phone call from one of his sidekicks informing me that it was most likely the fact that I was copying low grade VHS tapes that were being viewed on relatively HD screens (on the PC) and that was the main cause for the freezing; that ongoing transfer of quality. Of course there was nothing wrong with the Recorder!
ALL it meant was I had to recopy ALL the original VHS tapes again in a lesser quality 'format' (from the original cam, which I don't have of course) onto the HDD and that would likely solve the problem. Incidentally Sony's customer services were absolutely appalling over this matter. I used a Panasonic NV-HV61 VHS player from which to copy the original 90 tapes.
Firstly, does anyone have any ideas as to why the burnt DVDs freeze and pixelate? I'd LOVE to be able to simply flick a setting and re-burn from the Sony HDD although I have to confess I've lost heart with the Sony Recorder.
Secondly, will the Tosh do what I want without too much grief? It seems to have had good reviews, withstood the test of time in that it's still being produced, and presumably fully compatibility from VHS through HDD to DVD, and that the end products will playback on all DVD players! Not too much to ask of a dedicated bit of equipment
Many thanks in advance!
Can you remember what recording settings you used at the first transfer?
Unless you were using some exceptionally high quality rate which would make subsequent players struggle with the delivered off-disc bit rate I would regard it as general nonsense that the transfer characteristics have anything to do with this.
VHS video can be odd to transfer because of the typical tape noise inherent in tape systems can cause problems for the digitising process ... A tape source is normally recognised and this noise is normally filtered out.
However - I think this is all a red herring.
This is characteristic of an extremely widespread and [once used to be] very common problem.
When disc freeze and pixellate - in many different players... it means one thing - Inadequately burned discs.
There can be a few reasons for this... of which one is a weak or poorly calibrated laser.
But the most common reason, by a huge margin, is poor quality discs / poor batch of discs / or poor compatibility of discs with the recorder.
The DVD blank market has been swamped for years with discs of appalling quality.
This is a problem encountered countless number of times on this forum - and in the majority of cases, when decent quality disc blanks are used, reliability of burning and playback returns to 100% reliability.
So what discs were you using on both occasions?
Another point to make is that if you have a working VHS machine it is better just to get a straight DVD recorder rather than one that has an integrated VHS deck.
But that point aside, the Panasonic machine will be as good as you can get. and one I am happy to recommend.. whereas I am not prepared to recommend Toshiba DVDR's