Monday, July 06, 2009

Japan DVD-HDD Video Recorder Incompatibility

The other day I was asked by a friend to see a Ken Watanabe TV show we had recorded, because the friend had missed it. A long saga ensued of us trying to give our friend a DVD of the recording we took with our Sharp Aquos DVD / HDD Recorder. You'd think that you would just be able to play such a DVD in any DVD player. Well, you can't. Long story short, in the end we could not provide our friend a DVD with this show on it.

At first, when we gave our friend the DVD, she returned it saying it was broken, and that she tried it on her normal DVD player and on her Windows PC. I tried it on a Mac and on a Windows PC, and indeed, it would not play back.

I accessed the created DVD as a data disk, and was able to retrieve a 4 GB file with a VRO extension. I found out that VRO is an MPEG-2 format, so I purchased the MPEG-2 playback plugin for QuickTime. After the installation, QuickTime would open the file, but nothing appeared in the QuickTime viewer screen.

I tried also the following:

  • Renaming the file's extension to VOB or MPG. No difference trying to play it back in DVD Player.
  • Viewing the files (.vro, .vob, .mpg) in VLC. Nada.
  • Viewing the files in MPEG Streamclip. Nope.
  • Viewing the files in MPlayer. Uh uh.
  • Burning the file to another DVD via Toast. Sorry, it would not even render.

Well, after lots of tries and googling, in the end I read that Japanese makers protect their VRO files, and while there appear to be ways of modifying the file using a hex editor, I did not want to go there.

There's apparently no easy way to play back a DVD you create on a Sharp Aquos DVD / HDD Recorder on a PC or Mac.

Too bad, and what a waste of an evening.

2 comments:

Hugh Ashton said...

So what that means is that the Sharp device doesn't actually record DVDs. It uses the DVD-R medium to record its own proprietary combination of formats (same as it uses on the hard disk), and incorporates an industry-standard playback device as well as its own.

Why does this not surprise me at all? Of course, if you'd bought a Sony, you'd have had to use Sony's own proprietary media which would look and smell the same as the normal discs, but would be totally different.

Ah... Standards.... They're wonderful. There are so many to choose from.

Rick Cogley said...

Hi Hugh - lol, it does not surprise me a bit. As it was dawning on me that they might be doing something to the file (after 5 hours messing with it), I remembered their 300 page manual saying something about the DVDs working only in other Aquoses... Yuck. There are so many people with this problem, it seems, looking at the google-net.