As mentioned here, my Panasonic DMR-E80H DVD Recorder is not working properly. I know this because after spending too much of yesterday watching it crash and destroy blank DVDs, today I spent an hour on the phone — most of it on "hold" — before a nice lady at the Panasonic Help Line told me, "Your machine is not working properly." She suggested I take it to an Authorized Service Center, and I sure got the feeling I was speaking to someone who knew a lot less about my machine than I did.
Several folks who own Panasonic DVD Recorders have written to ask me what the trouble is, and the rest of this post will probably only be comprehensible to them. It worked fine for the first month but yesterday I wanted to dub two groups of programs — a group of five shorts of 5-6 minutes onto one DVD-R, two half-hour shows onto another. When I tried to do either, the machine went into an annoying ritual it has suddenly learned. The dubbing aborts after about twenty seconds, then the machine stops recording and locks up (it even seems to turn itself off for an instant), then it comes back to life and the front panel says "Recover" for a while, then displays — in some order — "An error occurred, please check the media" and "Press Enter" and "Bye." I wrecked a lot of blanks this way, then cruised the Internet for folks with similar problems. Some said it was due to incompatible media, which I suppose is possible, but that would mean that after successfully handling 50 or 60 blanks of the brand I use, the machine suddenly decided it didn't like them. Others in discussion groups suggested that the Panasonic's harddisk gets fragmented and that periodically, you have to forget about all the stuff you've recorded on it, reformat and start over. And still others suggested it means the harddisk is simply faulty.
Anyway, I was able to dub the group of five shows to a DVD-RAM disk but not to a DVD-R so I did that and unplugged the machine overnight. This morning, I plugged it in and was able to dub the 2-show group to a DVD-R. In fact, I made two copies. Then I turned my attention to the 5-short group, tried to dub it to a DVD-R and the machine began performing its crash ritual again. I rebooted, reformatted the harddisk, dubbed the 5 shorts from the DVD-RAM to the harddisk, then dubbed them without problem to a DVD-R. When I tried to run a second copy of the same shows, the machine crashed…and there the matter stands. I'm starting to think it may be a bad harddisk but maybe the machine just doesn't like the shows I'm dubbing.