Just to finish off this closed thread from a month ago.
With SoftwareRT's advice, and a lot of experimentation, I managed to copy a VHS tape to a DVD (a DVD+R in my case). This is some of what should be understood between the lines of the manual.
The first thing is to start with no tape in the VHS slot and your unformatted disk in the DVD slot and DRIVE SELECT as DVD. If you do this, the machine begins by asking if you want to format the disk, and you take it from there using the FUNCTION MENU (advanced copy). That may seem obvious now, but if you start with the drive select at VHS and/or have your VHS tape inserted, then FUNCTION MENU leads into a maze of operations, ending up with a failure either because the DVD is not formatted, or finding that the menu options you want are disabled.
One thing to watch out for: when you do introduce your VHS tape, the "recording direction" is set to DVD>VHS — the opposite of what you want! So you need to reverse it.
Another thing is "flexible recording". This allows you to make use of the full capacity of the DVD to optimise the quality for the exact length of material to be copied. If you try this, you will see at one point a default time of 8 hours mentioned. In my first attempt, I didn't change it, and the copying of my 1-hour VHS went on for eight hours, and produced a DVD which "played" for 8 hours. Thereafter I used the fixed DVD recording modes (XP, SP etc), choosing the one which wasted the least DVD space for a VHS of the particular length.
That 8-hour DVD, moreover, contained only 8 hours of silent blank screen — not one hour of video followed by a mere 7 hours of nothing. I suppose the machine was "copying" from some other source rather than the VHS, which probably wasn't even turning. I made the display say "AV3" subsequently, though I'm still unsure what it means.
With SoftwareRT's advice, and a lot of experimentation, I managed to copy a VHS tape to a DVD (a DVD+R in my case). This is some of what should be understood between the lines of the manual.
The first thing is to start with no tape in the VHS slot and your unformatted disk in the DVD slot and DRIVE SELECT as DVD. If you do this, the machine begins by asking if you want to format the disk, and you take it from there using the FUNCTION MENU (advanced copy). That may seem obvious now, but if you start with the drive select at VHS and/or have your VHS tape inserted, then FUNCTION MENU leads into a maze of operations, ending up with a failure either because the DVD is not formatted, or finding that the menu options you want are disabled.
One thing to watch out for: when you do introduce your VHS tape, the "recording direction" is set to DVD>VHS — the opposite of what you want! So you need to reverse it.
Another thing is "flexible recording". This allows you to make use of the full capacity of the DVD to optimise the quality for the exact length of material to be copied. If you try this, you will see at one point a default time of 8 hours mentioned. In my first attempt, I didn't change it, and the copying of my 1-hour VHS went on for eight hours, and produced a DVD which "played" for 8 hours. Thereafter I used the fixed DVD recording modes (XP, SP etc), choosing the one which wasted the least DVD space for a VHS of the particular length.
That 8-hour DVD, moreover, contained only 8 hours of silent blank screen — not one hour of video followed by a mere 7 hours of nothing. I suppose the machine was "copying" from some other source rather than the VHS, which probably wasn't even turning. I made the display say "AV3" subsequently, though I'm still unsure what it means.
