Auto switch and record from any source
The Video-Sense feature is only enabled on the last three inputs (6,7 and 8), so that’s obviously where the consoles have to go otherwise their signal won’t engage the auto-switching. That’s the easy bit. The hard part is deciding what you’re going to plug in elsewhere.
I thoroughly recommend biting the bullet, pulling your TV and giving it a long-overdue Hoovering and at the same time strip everything out from under the TV. Besides probably finding that video you thought you’d recorded over you can give everything a well deserved dust down and then figure out the best way to plug it all in. This is important. The last thing you want to do is plug it all in, slide the TV back and then realise that you’ve given priority to the Sky box over the DVD player as this means you can’t watch a DVD whilst recording from Sky…
Click for larger imageYep, that’s something else the Smart-SCART PLUS, it let’s you watch any source whilst recording from any source… but quite how you do that isn’t even touched upon in the single sheet of paper that Bluedelta calls the manual. Thankfully, Bluedelta’s tech support is second to none and after explaining my problem, the answer was duly supplied. The sheet does say that you can use the loop-back recording feature if you plug the input for your DVD or video recorder into input 2 and the output into input 3, you can now record from any source.
But quite how you do that isn’t covered on the info sheet, hence my call to tech support. All you have to do is set-up your recording device, in this case my DVD recorder, to use the requisite AV channel for the input you want. For example, I have the DVD recorder set-up so that terrestrial channels, BBC, ITV, etc. are on channels 1-5. Channel 6 is Sky and then AV1 is either inputs 6,7 or 8 from the Smart-SCART PLUS.
So to record a Sky program to my DVD recorder, I just find channel 6 on the DVD recorder and use the Sky remote to navigate to my chosen channel and hit the record button at the right time. Once that’s done I can go off and watch TV, play a game or watch a DVD with my other DVD player, happy that the DVD recorder is being fed the Sky signal by the Smart-SCART PLUS.
Having had a good look around the Bluedelta website, there is a disclaimer to the effect that they keep the instructions brief because manufacturers lable the same thing differently, ie AV1 might be Input1, Video 1 or something else entirely. That's fine in a way and I can understand Bluedelta doing this, but a bit ore direction on the usage of the Smart-SCART PLUS would've been a help.
For those of you that are interested, here's the set-up I opted for and have been happy with:
Input 1 = Sky
Input 2 = DVD Recorder in
Input 3 = DVD Recorder out
Input 6 = XBox 360
Input 7 = PS2
Input 8 = GameCube
Now try as I might, my Philips DVD player just did not want to work with the Smart-SCART PLUS. For some reason the damn thing kept sending a signal all the time, regardless of whether I used a quality, fully featured SCART cable or a cheap one. So in the end I opted to leave the DVD player on its own SCART lead direct to the TV.
However, if I have been able to get it to work, I could've made use of the Smart Cinema feature built into the Smart-SCART PLUS. This nifty feature is perfect for those of you with a home cinema set-up using you DVD player for the decoding. You whack your DVD player into Input 2 and if the Smart-SCART PLUS senses a video signal from higher numbered inputs, it blanks the video from the DVD player but allows the audio to pass through from the other source, giving you 5.1 sound decoded by your DVD player, cool eh?
