Re: Recording to DVD from Virgin V6 Box
 

So what you need to preserve both HD video and dolby soundtrack is the following, a HDMI splitter and a Hauppauge HD PVR 2 Gaming Edition Plus linked to your PC/MAC.

Archive will have to be done in real time but it works.

Re: Recording to DVD from Virgin V6 Box
 

Even with SCART, you have copy protection in place. Any HDMI to SCART converter will honour that copy protection, so you are back where you started. HDMI devices are covered by licensing, and part of that requires the manufacturer of any device to include copy protection(HDCP). Some manufacturers ignore that and simply strip out HDCP.

IIRC Freeview SD transmissions are not copy protected, Freeview recorders did(and maybe still do) allow dubbing of a recording to DVD or transfer to computer with no loss of quality and complete with subtitles.

Re: Recording to DVD from Virgin V6 Box
 

Just a brief note to say that I was able to resume recording on to DVD via the way described earlier using both the Converter and the splitter. Many thanks for your help.

Re: Recording to DVD from Virgin V6 Box
 

Do you get a reasonable picture quality?

As good as standard definition?

Re: Recording to DVD from Virgin V6 Box
 

I think reasonable is about as good as you can describe it. Not SD quality but also not a million miles away from it

Re: Recording to DVD from Virgin V6 Box
 

Ok thanks for the prompt reply.

Incidentally, the lack of scart output also affects SkyQ, one of the reasons I didn't upgrade from skyHD.

Re: Recording to DVD from Virgin V6 Box
 

You have to remember that the old analog PAL (composite) signal had to be compatible with monochrome & colour sets: To that end the Y component (B&W) uses the full 5.5MHz and 576 active lines whereas the colour difference components (R-Y and B-Y) sit in ~1MHz and half the number of lines because of the two line averaging process of the PAL system.

It works because the brain tends to make the fuzzy colours fit inside the sharper B&W images much like the colouring book of a child.

SD is able to give each individual colour a full bandwidth.

Re: Recording to DVD from Virgin V6 Box
 

Any solution also works for streaming devices such as NowTV, Roku, Amazon Firestick and probably all others.