TIVO-burned DVDs play on non-TIVO systems?

[dgrrr]

Quickie question....

I read that the current generation TIVO DVD Recorders put a "tivo-like menu" on the DVD's they burn...

But such a TIVO-burned DVD can PLAY on ANY OLD DVD PLAYER, right? The DVD player doesn't have to be related to TIVO at all, to play it?

e.g. My mother burns a DVD using her TIVO DVD Recorder device. Then she ships one off to my grandpa in prison in alaska who has some old non-tivo DVD player...

it'll still play?

How bout my brother in prison in paris? (Are the dvd's in european prison system different?)

(And what about my grandma? Can she watch tivo dvd's in hell?)

[shabadoo25]

Quickie question....

I read that the current generation TIVO DVD Recorders put a "tivo-like menu" on the DVD's they burn...

But such a TIVO-burned DVD can PLAY on ANY OLD DVD PLAYER, right? The DVD player doesn't have to be related to TIVO at all, to play it?

e.g. My mother burns a DVD using her TIVO DVD Recorder device. Then she ships one off to my grandpa in prison in alaska who has some old non-tivo DVD player...

it'll still play?

How bout my brother in prison in paris? (Are the dvd's in european prison system different?)

(And what about my grandma? Can she watch tivo dvd's in hell?)

It looks like a TiVo menu, but it's really not. I can't answer the European question, but it will work in a regular dvd player.

[b5ver]

It looks like a TiVo menu, but it's really not. I can't answer the European question, but it will work in a regular dvd player.

and on laptops.

[megazone]

The TiVo DVD burners product DVDs compliant with the DVD Video specification, encoded in NTSC. So any DVD Video system that supports NTSC DVDs will play them, so long as they handle -R or -RW media in general.

European DVD systems are usually PAL, not NTSC, but many of them will handle NTSC discs as well. So it really depends on what the deck handles. PC based players don't care for the most part.

I don't know about hell, they probably use SECAM...

[dgrrr]

And by "tivo type menus" are we also talking about the ability to go forward at three different speeds?

[petew]

And by "tivo type menus" are we also talking about the ability to go forward at three different speeds?

No. That's a function of the player. When you start playing the DVD you get a "Now Playing" style menu, selecting an item gives the program info screen, select play and you're playing a video stream. At that point only the DVD players standard functions are available.

[TydalForce]

some older DVD players may have difficulty with burned DVDs in general - this has nothing to do with TiVo specifically, but is worth pointing out in a discussion like this. If there's a 5+ year old dvd player, don't hold your breath....

[DaisyChain]

Dvds made on my Tivo DVD-DVR, play just fine on my Dvd player in my Toshiba television and also in my laptop. I have not tried it elsewhere. However I hear they also work on Playstation 2 dvd player ;)

The Tivo menu really doesn't mean anything other than letting people know where the disc came from.

[megazone]

DVD-R has a lower reflectivity than factory DVD Video discs, and DVD-RW is lower still.

That lower reflectivity caused problems with some early players. When they tried to read the data they'd sometimes thing they were reading the top layer of a dual-layer disc, or they just couldn't read it at all. Some players have firmware updates to fix the problem, and any player sold for the past few years should handle -R/RW just fine. It was really only an issue with early units.

[Mikeguy]

Just as recently as 2 days ago, I found that a newly-created TIVO-created DVD would not run automatically on my IBM Thinkpad. While I got a TIVO menu screen, there were no contents listed in it. However, I could play the contents by opening the DVD folder itself and playing the files directly.

This has happened to me in the past as well.