Sony DVDirect VRD-MC3

It works well, but that didn’t stop us from forensically ripping the guts out of it.

Yep, so it’s a bit CE for Atomic. And it looks like it’s got an iPod in the middle. But when Sony offers something of good value that is actually a bloody good device too, we tend to sit up and take notice.

The DVDirect is for all intents and purposes a DVD burner strapped to a custom board and chip that helps to create fully menu-driven DVDs from pretty much any composite, S-Video, USB or 4-pin FireWire source. It’ll even create picture slideshows with a choice of three background music presets if you tell it to, courtesy of the inbuilt card reader that supports Memory Stick Duo/SD, Memory Card, xD and CF.

It’s definitely not for high-end production as evidenced by the lack of component, but could be the perfect ease-of-use tool should you have a bunch of VHS, beta or old handicam footage lying around that you’d like to digitise with a minimum of fuss.

It really is as easy as setting up the source, inserting a DVD and pressing the big record button. You can even pause midway and switch your source, meaning you can stitch a single DVD together from a number of tapes. During this entire process, footage is played back through the centre screen.

From the auto-DVD menu point of view, there are four presets you can select from in terms of background, and chapters can be created automatically at a time period you desire, from five to 15 minutes. Interestingly there doesn’t seem to be an option to turn the DVD menu off altogether.

Video quality can be adjusted should you want to store more on the DVD than usual, and of course you can select between NTSC and PAL. To finish up, you just hit the stop button, and for compatibility finalise the disc through the setup options. Done!

So, a decent product, all done and dusted right? Nah.

Being Atomic, we ripped the case open, jacked in a standard IDE cable and checked out exactly what sort of drive the DVDirect was.

DVDInfoPro identified it as a Sony DW-Q120A, a re-badged Lite-On SHW-160P6S. We ran it through the ImgBurn discovery test to see how it treated some TDK 2x DVD-RW, media code TDK502sakuM3.

CPU utilisation on the verification was excessively high (on average about 10% and massively spiking to 40% at the end of the disc), meaning that there were read back problems. Fortunately the drive is used primarily to record, and in this regard the write speed kept a consistent 2x for the entire burn with no visible problems. Quality graphs from the PIPO scan were also unimpressive – so we thought what the hel. With the help of tnFW and rpc1.org we cross-flashed to firmware PS0B of the Lite-On model and tried again. This, inconceivably, while giving an ever so slightly better CPU utilisation read graph, gave a worse result for the write quality. This suggests there are potential issues with hardware/firmware here.

Still, this is all being a bit hardcore for the target market it’s aimed at – the home user with a lot of old video that needs to be converted hassle free – and in this light it’s certainly an excellent product, not to mention represents a bit of a boon to the home recording community considering its price point. Despite the average DVD burner contained within, we can give the DVDirect a cautious thumbs-up.