Pause and rewind live TV

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One advanced feature available with some DVD recorders is the ability to pause, rewind and watch live television.

The way it works is as follows, your watching a live TV programme whilst recording it, you press pause, the device keeps recording, but the DVD recorder can also allow you to simultaneously watch and rewind recorded portions of the programme.

There usually is a limit to the amount of time you can either pause or rewind the recording. Up to recently one hour was about the maximum time a recording could be left on pause.

The technology alot of DVD recorders use to achieve this ability is compatibility with DVD-RAM discs. DVD-RAM's are dvd discs which work somewhat like a computers hard disk, as the 'RAM' portion of the term suggests.

There has been a variety of versions released, starting with,

version 1.0, record rate 1x. SL disc 2.58 GB, DL disc 5.16 GB
version 2.0, record rate 2x. SL disc 4.7 GB, DL disc 9.4 GB
version 2.1, record rate 3x
version 2.2, record rate 5x
version 2.3, record rate 6x
version 2.4, record rate 8x
version 2.5, record rate 12x
version 2.6, record rate 16x

The discs can be accessed just like a computers hard disk would. Therefore they can work just like TiVo and Sky+, which use a non-removable hard disk to record, store and playback digital recording.

The DVD-RAM discs are relatively inexpensive, costing less than £1. Some versions can also be over-writtern around one hundred thousand times without loss of quality.

The recording process has also been designed with exacting standards, the verification of software and hardware, and the disc verification management standards ensure a high rate of safe guards for recorded data.