DVD recorder/DivX player €99 in Dunnes

norbert64

fergie13 wrote:

bought the plustron last week. done automatic scan but will only pick up 4 stations channel 4, E4,living and discovery, will find all channels on manual search but cannot store them as automatic scan only found 4 slots, tried auto scan from another house in case signal was bad still the same. tried everything i could think of but no joy, brought plustron back got a new one exact same problem. any help very much appreciated

manual tuning can be quite troublesome at times on a lot of DVDR's, you're better off just recording through a scart cable, TBH.

chilly wrote:

This is slightly off topic but it's still relevant. I read last week in the Independent that Dunnes are changing their policy as regards returns .They are going to give a store credit note as exchange in future and if you return things later than 1 month after purchase you will have to pick something there and then in store for the same value. It's already started in some Dublin stores and will be nationwide soon.
I bought a recorder for E99 from Dunnes last year and I wish I had returned it because it's now useless. If anyone plans to return their recorder sooner rather than later might be the wiser option in light of the new returns policy.

i'm surprised they haven't been doing it all along, lol.

BTW, not to hijack the thread or anything but DID have a DVDR for 109

http://www.didstore.com/store_detail.asp?modelcode=NMRW200&subid=199

can't say I've heard of the brand, but it has more or less the same features as the Plustron. Those in the know, here at boards can probably shed some light on things. :cool:

mendo

The Nordmende DVD recorder doesn't play DIVX, as far as I can see on the specs.
Or maybe is not declared, maybe due to licence fee for the DIVX licence.

Mendo

whatsupdoc?

Dunnes are changing their policy as regards returns .They are going to give a store credit note as exchange in future and if you return things later than 1 month after purchase you will have to pick something there and then in store for the same value. It's already started in some Dublin stores and will be nationwide soon.

If the goods are faulty they have to refund or replace it's the law.
They can't just give you a credit note if it's faulty.
Mind you all you'd have to do is your shopping there or buy beer.

long_b

Hi - having the same problem with tuning the tv stations in - only 4 showing up.

Did anyone manage to get this working ?

wingnut

whatsupdoc? wrote:

they have to refund or replace it's the law.
They can't just give you a credit note if it's faulty.

a credit note allows purchase of a replacement

Esel

wingnut wrote:

a credit note allows purchase of a replacement

Not the point. You may already have bought another one elsewhere as you needed it right then; or you may not be happy to take another one of the same model.

coolcar

I also bought a Plustron DVD recorder from Dunnes , done automatic scan but it will only pick up 4 stations channel 4, E4,living and discovery. Did anyone manage to get this workng?

fergie13 wrote:

bought the plustron last week. done automatic scan but will only pick up 4 stations channel 4, E4,living and discovery, will find all channels on manual search but cannot store them as automatic scan only found 4 slots, tried auto scan from another house in case signal was bad still the same. tried everything i could think of but no joy, brought plustron back got a new one exact same problem. any help very much appreciated

coolcar

Doodlebug wrote: »

For €99, Dunnes are stocking a Plustron DVD recorder - says on the box it plays MP4 (usually a good sign with the Plustrons I've owned before that it'll play anything!).

Thinking about picking one up.

The model number is BDR1300. Haven't found anything on the net about it. It also has a USB-B socket on the front of it and uses DVD+/-R disks.

Looks like a bargain! Plustron are usually good (crappy remote, but easy to use).

Anyone here got one or know anyone who has? Interested in seeing what it can do!

I got one of these recorders - it would only pick up 4 channels from NTL - no use for me

DingDong

Sounds like it setup for the UK. Your only picking up the UHF band most of the analogue channels are on band 3s.

Mimikyu

This post has been deleted.

Paul Mc Gann

Any help re Plustron BDR1300 (BEOND)
Quick question!
Most DVDs I've tried either play one or other of A)video, background sound and speech sound with subtitles
OR
B)video, background sound, no speech sound or subtitles but with commentary (obviousely for visually impaired)
In other words I have full sound with subtitles or no speech sound at all other than commentary.
Any idea on how to play DVD without the additional features?
Thanks

That Guy 901

You have to use the remotes menu and select and deselect what you want and dont want.

Does anyone know if you can connect this player up to a surround sound system?

Thanks.

Paul Mc Gann

Thanks,

But I've been pulling my hair out for the last hour trying to navigate the menu to solve this problem. Any ideas?:

WillyFXP

Paul Mc Gann wrote: »

Thanks,

But I've been pulling my hair out for the last hour trying to navigate the menu to solve this problem. Any ideas?:

take it back and spend another 29 quid on a philips DVDR3480 from currys - much better machine, can be made region free from remote code and can also tune in all ntl channels.

Paul Mc Gann

Thanks,

If I dont get this thing sorted I'll take your good advice. In the meantime I've had it and am off to the scratcher.......zzzzz

Paul Mc Gann

Anybody else out there who can help me?

Please

Charisteas

I bought this Plustron BDR1300 model today in Dunnes for €98.50, but considering taking it back for reasons you will read soon, but I will share my findings here -

Multi Region - yes

Divx - I tried a dvd-r which has 12 episodes of '24' burned onto it, and it struggled to play the first episode (picture was pixilated and the audio was skipping) but the other episodes seemed ok. The first episode on this disk works fine in a Philips DivX player though.

USB (1GB flash drive, format - FAT) - played .avi and .mpeg files perfectly.

USB (160GB external hard drive, format - NTFS) - the Plustron dvd player could not read or recognise the external hard drive.


I basically bought this Plustron player for the sole purpose of playing files from my external hard drive, but because I am having problems doing this, I am considering returning the player.

But I was wondering if anyone could answer a question for me - is the Plustron unable to read my external hard drive because it's formatted to NTFS, or because the 160GB is just too much data to handle?

I know that I could format my external hard drive to 'FAT' (FAT is the same format as the 1GB flash drive which did work with the Plustron) and see if this does indeed work, but the problem is that I have nowhere to temporarily store the 150GB worth of files I have on it, my computers hard drive is way too small.

Can anyone guarantee that an external hard drive formatted to FAT would work?

Thanks for any helpful comments you might have!

Aquos76

I have an external HD 500gb fomatted to fat32 and it works perfect using my philips divx player. I have tried connecting up other HD's which were NTFS and the philips could not pick them up. So I would say that it should recognise it if you reformat it to FAT.

The only problem with using fat though, is it cant handle a single file size greater than 4gb

coldfire1x

Charisteas wrote: »

Can anyone guarantee that an external hard drive formatted to FAT would work?

Generally any palyer with USB can only read from the FAT formatted drives. I think it will definately work.

plonker

I'm having the same problem as Paul with the subtitles and or no voices with some dvd's and copies and cant get it sorted,had ye any luck before I throw it back?

transporter-d

i was up in harvey norman the other week and they had the recorders for 99 but the beauty about them is they play divx and they are multi-region:cool:

Paul Mc Gann

Still no one has come up with a solution. Your best bet is probably to bring it back. I've been too lazy--but if there is any whiz that can sort this out please lets hear from you.

transporter-d

go into the main settings and highlight factory settings,or any reset feature it has

bravo

Hi Guys,
Picked up the Plustron BDR1300 in Dunnes (€98) and trying to get to grips with the USB connection....all advice appreciated.
Works fine with 2GB Flash Key but won't read from 250GB Ext HD formmatted Fat32. Any ideas or anyone got any codes for the remote control?
Thnaks guys

TM

bravo wrote: »

won't read from 250GB Ext HD formmatted Fat32. Any ideas

Do you mean multiple 32GB FAT32 partitions or something else? If the latter then try the former!

bravo

Hi TM,
Thanks for the reply. PC shows the external drive (250GB) as formatted to FAT32 (no partition). DVD recorder does not see the drive but will recognise a 2GB Flash Key when inserted through USB.

TM

Is it possible for you to try repartitioning your hard drive to create one or more <= 32GB FAT32 formatted partitions and see if your player can see these? Obviously this will destroy any existing contents of your drive.

How did you format your hard drive as a single (?) 250GB FAT32 formatted partition or did it come that way? If I recall correctly normally you can only create <= 32GB FAT32 formatted partitions other than with the FDISK that came with W9x or some earlier versions of Windows.

bravo

Hi TM,
Re: formatting large drive to FAT32, found this article somewhere on the web, not my own work unfortunately, followed instructions and it works:

QUOTE-
How to format a large drive in FAT32
Solution for formatting a volume bigger then 32GB in FAT32

It turns out that Windows XP won't let you format a volume bigger than 32GB with FAT32. You could use NTFS, but that's not what FATlib supports. NTFS can only be written safely by Windows XP - there are no other drivers for other OS's, unlike FAT which is supported by virtually anything.

As Microsoft put it here:

You cannot format a volume larger than 32 gigabytes (GB) in size using the FAT32 file system during the Windows XP installation process. Windows XP can mount and support FAT32 volumes larger than 32 GB (subject to the other limits), but you cannot create a FAT32 volume larger than 32 GB by using the Format tool during Setup. If you need to format a volume that is larger than 32 GB, use the NTFS file system to format it. Another option is to start from a Microsoft Windows 98 or Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition (Me) Startup disk and use the Format tool included on the disk.

Using Windows 98 obviously opens up other issues - It doesn't support USB 2.0 or SATA as far as I know. Formatting a huge disk will take ages. It suports IDE, but not 48bit LBA, which is required for drives greater than 137GB. Also, you need to patch format.exe and fdisk to work with disks greater than 64GB. Even then scandisk will corrupt large disks unless you disable it. It can be done, but basically, this is ancient 16 bit code, and using it on modern hardware is not a good idea. There is a port of mkdosfs from Linux to Win32. I tried it, and chkdsk complained about being unable to test a RAW filesystem. It also uses funny cluster sizes, only 4K for normal sized disks.

Actually, looking back at the Microsoft comment, if I could format the volume myself, all would be OK. Fat32 is pretty simple, so it occured to me to write a fast format routine to do the job. Note that the 32GB limit is a limit of the formatter in Windows XP. FAT32 itselft should be OK to 2TB, limited by a 32 bit sector count in the boot sector. XP comes with a partitioning tool, called Disk Management. It even has Wizards for partitoning. This should be a cinch.

I've tested this with a SATA disk as follows. Power off the computer and connect the disk. Power up again - check the Bios finds it. If you have a IDE or SATA disk, make sure you power off before connecting, USB and Firewire ones can be connected with the power on.

Click Start menu, select Run and enter diskmgmt.msc

If it asks you to initialise the disk, make sure you select a Basic disk, as opposed to a Dynamic.
There's a guide on Disk Management here You need to find the disk with unallocated space. Right click on it and select "New Partition" and follow these steps, clicking "Next" to get move on at each stage.

1. Partition Wizard starts, just click next to move on
2. Select Primary Partition.
3. Enter the maximum size for the Partition Size
4. Choose assign a drive letter. I used F:
5. Select "Do not Format this partition"
6. There will be a dialog box, summarising all the previous stuff. Click Finish

Now you have a drive letter, this is what we will pass to the formatter

Now download fat32format. Extract the single EXE file to somewhere suitable, like:

C:. Click Start->Run and enter cmd.

CD (=change directory) to the where you extracted the fat32format exe, e.g. by typing

CD /D c:

Now you're almost done.

Type this fat32format f:

You should see this displayed

Warning ALL data on drive 'f' will be lost irretrievably, are you sure (y/n)

Now when it says this, it really means it. If you format the boot sector, FATs and root directory will be filled with zeros. By typing pressing Y and hitting return, you're also absolving me of liability for whatever was on the disk before.

Assuming you don't bail out at this point you should see something like this -

Warning ALL data on drive 'f' will be lost irretrievably, are you sure
(y/n) :y
Size : 250GB 488392002 sectors
512 Bytes Per Sector, Cluster size 32768 bytes
Volume ID is 1bdb:2c1d
32 Reserved Sectors, 59604 Sectors per FAT, 2 fats
7629261 Total clusters
7629260 Free Clusters
Formatting drive f:...
Clearing out 119304 sectors for Reserved sectors, fats and root cluster...
Wrote 61083648 bytes in 0.988463 seconds, 61796609.106193 bytes/sec
Initialising reserved sectors and FATs...
Done

This means that all has gone according to plan. It should take about 4 seconds per Terabyte to format the disk. You can run chkdsk f: at this point if you're curious, and see something like this -

The type of the file system is FAT32.
Volume Serial Number is 1BDB-2C1D
Windows is verifying files and folders...
File and folder verification is complete.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.
244,136,352 KB total disk space.
244,136,320 KB are available.

32,768 bytes in each allocation unit.
7,629,261 total allocation units on disk.
7,629,260 allocation units available on disk.

This shows that my calculations match up with the ones inside Windows, which is good news

It is also possible to set the cluster size with a -cN parameter where N is the number of sectors per cluster. On a hard disk, which is the only sort we support, one sector is 512 bytes. The cluster size will be N times 512. I played around with this, and it seems that Windows XP supports small cluster sizes, except that chkdsk runs very slowly, presumably because it needs to read the huge FAT that results from these settings. Given the nature of FAT32, you can't reduce the cluster size such that the number of clusters is more than 228. I'd recommend using the default cluster sizes, which are the Microsoft recommended ones, unless you need to force them for testing or something

There are a couple of things you need to know before running fat32format. You need to have Administrator rights on XP for it to work, since it opens the drive in raw write mode. You also need to make sure that there are no open files on the volume - if there are you will see a message like this -

Warning ALL data on drive 'f' will be lost irretrievably, are you sure
(y/n) :y
Failed to open device - close any files before formatting
Are you SURE you're formatting the RIGHT DRIVE!!!

This should make it a bit harder to lose data, assuming that you have at least one open file on the drives with data you want to keep. The drive that Windows is currently running from will have lots of files open - the pagefile, registry etc. I usually keep an Explorer.exe open in the root directory of any other drives to block format from running. Finally, it will only work with hard disks with 512 bytes per sector. If you have a DVD-Ram disk, format using the Windows formatter.

One last thing - fat32format is designed to format disks quickly. It doesn't check for bad sectors. If you need integrity checks, run a chkdsk /R f: after the format.

Finally and most importantly, it isn't possible to recover your data if you format the wrong disk, be careful using it. It is licensed under the GPL license.

-END QUOTE

ISOT

bravo wrote: »

Hi TM,
Thanks for the reply. PC shows the external drive (250GB) as formatted to FAT32 (no partition). DVD recorder does not see the drive but will recognise a 2GB Flash Key when inserted through USB.

how long are you giving for the plustron to see the hard drive.?
i reformatted my 320gb ex hard drive to fat32 (it could not see it before i done this) but it takes maybe 4 minutes after plugging it in before i can see it on the menu.then everything plays fine. plug it in again and give it 5 minutes before you try to navigate to the usb menu.
by the way i used the free utility swissknife to reformat the hd.

stwome01

Hi,

I got one of these Plustrons yesterday. This was after returning a Philips DVR3575. The picture through the philips was aweful. I think I had a faulty unit. :mad:

Anyway back to the Plustrons. It was able to read my 300GB Seagate Hard Drive (FAT32). It takes about a couple of minutes before it will allow me to see the USB drive after plug it in. All avi etc played fine for me.

It region free and the recording are of a acceptable quality. The user interface is fairly easy to use. All in all I am delighted with it so far. Budget wise the €98 is alot nicer than the €300 I spent on the philips.

Seán