LITE-ON IT CORPORATION LVW5045 DVD /hdd Recorder review:
1 stars (Worst Purchase Ever. ) - I bought this machine 3 month ago and immediately I encountered lots of problems within the first 72 hours. Called tech Support but was put on hold for 55 minutes, not getting any answer. Searched Internet and found several forum that talked about the problem I had (Turn out, My machine is not defective, It's by design, There're so many complains about this recorder that I wished that I had visited these forums before I bought the machine). Some problems can be corrected by upgrading the Firmware. Well. I did successfully upgraded to Firmware 193. But, Following are the problems I "STILL" have.



1. Video/Audio Sync issue. While recording Programme for more than 1 hour. The worst case I had, Audio is off 2 seconds in a 90 minites recording.



2. "Split" Videos cause System to Hang !!! .. Yes, You hear me right. System can hang and the only thing you can do is to unplug and reboot the machine ( Sound like my computer ). You can lost the current Recording if you're lucky. I had lost entire HardDisk twice.



3. Timer Recording is not reliable. I had several occations that set up the machine to record a TV series that run 8PM Mon-Fri. Strange thing is, It will record Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Skipped Tuesday and Friday. You have to admit the 5045 is kinda had a mind of its own.



4. Merge Clips into one file will lead the audio track corrupted at the "Join" point, You can FF to skip the problem area, but, it'a annoying. And, If you're trying to convert the 'Merged' file on PC into other format (rm, wmv, avi ...etc). The Sound will freeze up right at the first 'merge' point.



Firmware 195 released a week ago and it was so buggy that the website took it off and put back Firmware 193 again. Gosh.. If you like to do Beta-Testing for Liteon. than go for it. My recommendation is to buy a Panasonic or philip.



Update 4/30/2005 : Firmware 197 just released. The color problem is fixed, also, Close caption is working now. Trade off is, AC3 5.1 is not functioning ... *Sigh* I complain my Windows 98 all the time, but now, I feel it's more reliable than my DVD recorder.
5 stars (Lite-On LVW 5045 DVD/HDD Recorder) - The 5045 is the machine I've been waiting for. Has all the bells & whistles. Just installed the unit into a home theater system and put it through various tests using its many features. All performed extremely well. Beautiful playback from both the 160G hard drive and recordings made on DVDs at the two fastest speeds.

It's also a pleasure to have a machine that will record & playback in all formats with the exception of DVD RAM.

The Easy Guider feature makes the 5045 quite user friendly. A novice would have no problems quickly getting started with basic operating functions. Installation was also very easy as I hooked it into a home theater system. I used the component video outputs.

I definitely agree with Lite-On's slogan when it comes to the LVW-5045, "Simply Amazing".
4 stars (simply amazing) - it does have an issue with sometimes not recording a show, the firmware notes on their site even say that its an issue to be resolved in the next firmware upgrade.



But let's begin with that a player that has a downloadable firmware upgrade so you don't have to call the company, explain why you want an upgrade and then have to either take it to their shop or send it to them and wait 2 weeks. So it already had bonus points for making my life easier.



I love the time shift feature. I have three kids and I can't tell you how many times I've been watching something only to have them need me for something, or simply making to much noise and I have to go ask them to keep it down, only to have missed some of what I was watching. (I'm still waiting for the build your own light saber to replay so I can figure out how to set the correct power output on the laser, because right now it just fires a beam through stuff). Anyway I digress.



The simple fact of having a hard drive that I can record to is a lovely plus no media to mess with unless I want to archive it.



but the real area that this shines for me is the all write technology. It will burn to cd as well as dvd media. Will make vcd and svcd (if you don't know what that is check out http://www.dvdrhelp.com) and so I can use just regular cd-r media. which as I said I have kids and so If I want to record frosty the snowman for them to watch, I can snag a 30 cent cd-r disc and burn it to vcd or svcd for them to play in the family room, instead of wasting a dvd-r for it. Oh that also it also burns to dvd-r, dvd-rw, dvd+r, and dvd+rw. I've heard it does dvd-r dl but I haven't tried it.



another really nice feature hold on here, but it also makes audio cds. yep that's right.



and the last feature I really really enjoy. How many times have you set something to record and come in during recording and want to watch it, but you have to wait til the recording is over if you want to watch it from the beginning. Not anymore.

its really sweet. Walk in 15 minutes into recording smallville and just hit a button and watch it from the beginning while it still records it. all I have to say is "Sweeet!!!"



now if you are wondering why 4 stars, is because its still a bit buggy on that whole timed recording, it doesn't happen often, so its a minor annoyance and they are addressing it.



check out the specs on their site for any thing else I didn't cover. I just cover the stuff I really enjoy about it.



Update August 4th, 2005:

The unit still works wonderfully. Though there seems to be an issue with the 197 firmware as far as its handling of dolby digital signal. Sometimes it outputs it as plain stereo.



I have learned a few things when a disc hangs during burning, you can normally just hold in the power button on the unit to shut down the unit.



There was one occasion recently Were the power flickered out and back on during a burn and I had issues with burning after that. I took the unit apart and took the the 160GB seagate Ultra ATA hard drive out and hooked it up to my PC. It uses a FAT32 partition with a 64 cluster size. I guess when the power went out it it caused a size mismatch issue. I repaired the issues in windows, ran a defrag and put it back in the unit to have happy days again. Also I should note all the VOB files are accessable through windows. So in a case of the unit having issues you can

always snag the drive and get what you want off of it.







So after 6+ months I'm still very happy with my purchase

LITE-ON IT CORPORATION LVW5045 DVD -hdd Recorder is the Electronics version. The full version can be purchased by clicking on the "CLICK HERE TO ORDER" button below for around  341.99USD.