Ladies & Gentlemen,

I am definitely a newbie. After doing some researching and applying my computer technician skills, I got my DVR connected to my DVD recorder and working correctly. My main goal is to move my tv programs off the DVR so that I can free up the hard drive space. (probably the same reason millions of other people are doing the same thing)

But I noticed that when I copy them over to DVD they lose the HD format. I did expect some degradation in the picture quality, but what is most annoying are the bars that appear on the top and bottom of the copied programs.

Is there any way to avoid this? Thanks for any advise.

Transferring to 'DVD Recorder & Home Entertainment' section...

The black bars represent a letterboxed format, which is required to show all of a 16:9 image on a 4:3 screen.

Your DVR has output settings that determine how a 16:9 image is converted to 4:3, so you have to read the manual. The options might include letterbox, stretch and pan/scan, it depends on the DVR. SVHS and composite video do not support 16:9 images.

If you have a 16:9 monitor, you can use stretch mode on many DVR's to output a 16:9 image that's squeezed into 4:3. Record that, then use the monitor settings to stretch the image back to 16:9 when you play it.

This can work quite well with HD content.