Post your comments, questions, and suggestions on the TeraOptix Terapin Audio/Video CD-Recorder review.

Article Link: http://www.systemlogic.net/reviews/...raoptix/terapin

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ActiveTuning - Partner & Director Of Sales & Marketing

Just curious, any of you guys think you will be getting one of these badboys? If so, what made your decision? If not, why not? Is it the price? Is it just the lack of quality, what?

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ActiveTuning - Partner & Director Of Sales & Marketing

Just for your information, the organic layer in recordable cd's lasts only around 10 years...

Really? I did not know that....So any CD I have now, in 10 years will not work?

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ActiveTuning - Partner & Director Of Sales & Marketing

Only the cd-recordables, all cd-rs use an organic layer... however the pressed cd's you get from the store use a metallic layer and should last pretty much forever...

1 hour is plenty if you want to use it to store/record a series of television shows as they are almost always either 1/2 or a full hour.

Definitely correct there. But when it comes to movies, it's not...I was thinking that it would be pretty cool if you could copy a whole movie onto a CD and then throw onto your laptop, get on a plane (if you're going on a business trip or travelling or whatnot) and watch like that if your notebook doesn't have a DVD player....

Of course an hour of recording can give you a lot of uses. I'm sure burning a movie onto two CD's isn't that bad

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ActiveTuning - Partner & Director Of Sales & Marketing

Here's a quick one...what's the quality like when compaired with VHS? I know the VCD's I make on my computer are usually better than VHS, but what did you see? Just curious...NERO!

Actually I wouldn't consider them VHS quality even. Just because MPEG is compressed video so you'll see compression only in certain parts where there needs to be. VHS won't pixelate at all.

If you have a fast internet connection and AIM, I can send you a video I made with it from there if you'd really like to see what it looks like....Just let me know.

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ActiveTuning - Partner & Director Of Sales & Marketing

Recording from my GO Video VHS to the Terapin I get very frequent frame freezes and glitches as if this were streaming video through too slow a modem. Cable connection is through "Monster Cables" so no bitrate neck there. Recorded with Monitor enabled and not enabled and through both the front composite and rear composite video ports. Playback from the Terapin in playback mode, from my GO Video DVD player, and on my Macintosh in Quicktime all include the same frame freeze and glitch so it is a recording problem, not a playback issue. It appears to me that the processing power of this critter is not up to a VHS to digital real time conversion. Can't figure out how it worked for you - I am about to send it back to B&H PhotoVideo with a nasty note about their choice of products but I'd love to hear that there is some feature I didn't set correctly before I do that. So far I find this thing to be a total waste of $500.

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CampfireDan

Is it slow when you are playing it back as well? Mine was slow when it was recording, but worked fine when I played back.

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ActiveTuning - Partner & Director Of Sales & Marketing

Not just slow - it is garbled while recording due to freeze frames etc. It is okay for about fifteen minutes then seems to get hot and loose its ability to process the video wihtout glitches and freese frames. All the glitches and such get recorded and play back as recorded so it is not playing back slow - it is accurately playing back the horrible job it did converting VHS to MPEG. Heck -- to get those fifteen minutes I had to sit it out all by itself (no cabinet for this one) and turn the A/C down to seventy. Must not have a fan - or the fan that is supposed to exist is broken - can't here any fan sounds. When it was in the cabinet it only got about five minutes before it went kaput. I think this one is going back to the store. Guess I can figure out how to do the same trick on my G4 with I-movie -- but it seemed like a real nice and easy way to have a single machine do the conversion, compression and CD writing.

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CampfireDan

Hmm maybe you just have a bad machine? I recorded over 2 hours without any problems.....

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ActiveTuning - Partner & Director Of Sales & Marketing

Just recorded a VHS tape onto my miniDV Canon Elura then used that as the source for the Terapin. Worked perfectly. The Terapin does not like my three different VHS tape players but loves the miniDV Elura. "Tis a puzzlement." Also seems to do well with a DVD source through an analog connection. Even more of a puzzle. Wonder if having a high resolution source is the cure? Been planning to get the Sony Media Converter to import VHS to high quality MPEG digital on the fly anyway so maybe that will be the ultimate solution for the Terapin VHS problem for me. On the other hand - messed around with trying to import the .avi file then do MPEG compression on my Macintosh G4 from the same Elura miniDV tape -- talk about huge amounts of time! Looks like there may be a place for this Terapin thing as a hardware low compression (Sony Media Converter) to hardware high compression (Terapin) converter. But it does *not* work for me straight from a VHS player for me. What a peculiarity!

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CampfireDan