Customer Reviews

Streaming Networks iRecord PRO Personal Media Recorder

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Had this thing for at least several months, forgot when I bought it. But overall it's been very convenient. Long gone are the days of running wires from the TV to the computer and having to coordinate everything. Program a travel "thumb" stick with the type of format you want to record in... then press a button. It's nice to record TV and movie audio/video clips for my personal library.

Only annoying thing I found so far: every so often it freezes and stops recording, which sucks having to re-play the show over again. When it freezes on me, the light stays constantly on... I do find myself checking on the light often while recording, it's made me a little gun shy. But that's my only complaint.

Overall, it's nice to have a simple set-up by the TV area. Press of a button - done, it's recording. When finished, press one button, done. For how I record stuff, it works perfect.

The device would automatically shut down without warning. Does not notify wether or not the recording has stopped. Cannot copy copyrighted DVD's. But easy to use and performs as advertised.

Wanna digitalize your old LPs?
Wanna digitalize your old VHS tapes?
If you have an iPod, would you like to preprogram recording from a TV or set-top box wherever you happen to stay while traveling?

iRecord Pro is an answer for each of those purposes and, afaik, the only answer for all three. Works perfectly for me for all three purposes. Needless to say that anything you digitalize onto your ipod or usb stick (or smartphone) with the irecord pro is easy to burn as a cd (audio or video) or dvd afterwards.

I should mention that this is not (yet) an HD device. Audio, by the way, I reocmmend recording onto a stick at full/lossless/wave; Let itunes or whatever you use on the computer do the compression to whatever you prefer (I choose 256kb VBR) before you transfer the music to an ipod or a CD or whatever.

I have been purchasing both professional and consumer grade video encoders for many years and the iRecord Pro is probably the best that I have come across for s-Video/composite input capture. It does a great job of turning even poor quality input into acceptable digitized media and is quite outstanding with good quality input. The de-interlacing capabilities are unparalleled in my experience, even with products costing 10-20 times the price. The MP4 video is a snap to trim with Apple's Quicktime Pro software and it can be imported via iTunes into the iPad easily. The resulting video is rather bulky at approx 1.1 GB per hour and so is more appropriate for local viewing rather than using as is on the Internet. The reports about the unit having a noise fan when in use are correct and that probably should be corrected by the manufacturer. I could imagine that being very inconvenient for some uses of this encoder but I can live with it for my purposes. Since the audio is captured directly, the noise does not get onto the final product. I have not tried transcoding from the media yet but expect that to work fine.