Once the DVD-RW was initialized, I pressed the Video Recording button on the remote to call up the appropriate menu, which lets you specify the source you want to record—TV tuner or one of the inputs—and the quality setting. The DIVA 2 provides three such settings—High (HQ), Medium (MQ), and Low (LQ)—and each allows a concomitant amount of material to be recorded on one disc (HQ the least, LQ the most). According to the onscreen status display, the DVD-RW I had in there would record about 3.5 hours at HQ, 5.5 hours at MQ, and 12 hours at LQ. Malata claims that one recordable DVD can hold up to 15 hours of LQ-quality movies downloaded from the Internet. In any event, that's a lot more time than MPEG-2 can provide.

Also in this menu is a check box that lets you specify whether or not you want the machine to automatically name the recorded programs. These names consist of the date and time of the recordings, and you can't change them after the fact; so if you want a meaningful name for a program, enter it before recording. The naming procedure displays an onscreen qwerty keyboard that you navigate with the cursor controls, which is very cumbersome.

Pressing the Record button immediately starts the recording; you can also schedule recordings much like a VCR. I captured three clips at the three different quality settings, which use a variable bit rate to maximize efficiency. According to the onscreen display, HQ video played back at roughly 3Mbps, while MQ hovered around 1.8Mbps, and LQ was down around 800Kbps; in all three cases, audio was dished out at about 130Kbps.

For reasons I don't understand, the TV recordings at all three quality settings looked about the same: Aside from the too-bright image from the recorder's onboard tuner, they were all quite soft. I would expect to see some difference between the highest and lowest quality settings, but I saw virtually none. Puzzled, I recorded the SMPTE Resolution and Frequency Sweep test patterns from the Digital Video Essentials DVD (which is not copy protected) at all three settings. (I played VE in another DVD player and sent the signal to the DIVA 2 via S-video.) This confirmed my previous observations: There was little, if any, difference between the recordings.

Also of note was a distinct moiré pattern in the horizontal-resolution wedges, which are normally devoid of such patterns. The moiré started at about the 275-lines-per-picture-height mark, and the resolution lines were completely gone by about the 450 mark. On the Frequency Sweep, the response began falling off around 3MHz, and higher frequencies appeared as if they were lower; that is, there were visible vertical lines in the pattern at 4MHz and 5MHz, but they were spaced more like the 1MHz lines.

In addition to taking an inordinate amount of time to initialize, DVD-RW discs were very slow to respond to Play and Stop commands, taking up to 40 seconds to start playing a clip. More disturbing, HQ and MQ recordings on DVD-RW tended to pause intermittently; this problem was worse with HQ clips, but LQ recordings did not exhibit the behavior at all. I used TDK DVD-RW blanks, which are on the list of compatible media in the manual, and the same thing happened with two different discs. Malata sent me a second sample of the DIVA 2, which did the same thing. DVD+RW discs initialized almost immediately, had no intermittent pausing problems, and started and stopped playing very quickly.

Malata also sent me a home-movie disc (DVD-R) with footage of a student harp recital and some cars racing along a track; all were recorded in HQ mode from a miniDV source, and they loaded and stopped quickly. The harpist looked pretty good, but the outdoor racing footage was blown out in the bright areas, and there were some artifacts, including some shimmering along the edges of the stationary hills behind the track. To be fair, this could have easily been the fault of the inexpensive JVC camcorder used to capture the footage.

Playing the Diva
Next, I accessed the Internet to see what was available from the Aeon Digital server. For now, the content is free, but you must register on the site from a computer before you can access it. As of this writing, there are five main categories—Movies, Streaming Music, Music Videos, Live TV, and Trailers—each category further divided into genres.

The current movie pickings are mighty slim—mostly ancient black-and-white titles that are no doubt in the public domain. (Aeon has some big announcements coming in this regard; see the sidebar, "What the Future Holds.") You're supposed to be able to stream the movies at 400Kbps and 700Kbps or download them at 700Kbps and 1500Kbps, but every time I tried to do any of these, I was informed that the server was unavailable. Dang—I really wanted to watch Reefer Madness!

The streaming music selections were mostly modern techno-dance compilations, streamed at about 50Kbps. It took only a few seconds to buffer the stream, after which the music played without a problem, and it sounded reasonably good. There were only a few music videos, which streamed at about 700Kbps for video and 60Kbps for audio; in fact, the video looked much better than anything I had recorded off the air.

The list of Live TV streams included Flight TV, Pride Nation Network (gay-oriented content), and Sports, but only Pride Nation was actually available; it streamed at roughly 300Kbps for video and 50Kbps for audio, and it looked pretty good. Too bad the content was of no interest to me (not that there's anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld would say).

DVD playback from the DIVA 2 was somewhat problematic. First, I tried it in my main theater system after I reconfigured my Loewe HDTV display to accept a 480i component signal. It worked, although the display was not calibrated correctly for this configuration, and the picture looked too dark. Instead of recalibrating the set, I moved the DIVA 2 into the bedroom system, which has a calibrated 36-inch Panasonic analog TV with component inputs. However, every time I selected the DVD playback function, I heard a soft click emanate from within the DIVA 2 and the screen went completely black, although the front-panel display seemed to indicate that the disc was playing. I couldn't figure out what was wrong, and neither could my Malata contact—he'd sent me his own demo machine as a second sample and, therefore, couldn't duplicate my efforts.

Curtain
As I said at the top of this review, I'm a big fan of DVD recording. I'm also a big proponent of Internet access from the home theater, especially when it comes to acquiring AV content. The Malata DIVA 2 tries to address both of these areas, but with only limited success.

I've seen high-definition WM9 material that blew me away, but I was not very impressed with the quality of the DIVA 2's standard-def WM9 codec, especially on recordings made from the TV tuner. Speaking of which, the tuner needs to be redesigned to provide standardized output levels. It also needs to clean up its act with DVD-RW discs, which behave in a most lugubrious, pause-ridden manner. For now, DVD+RW is the only way to go if you want to use rewritable DVDs.

Regarding Internet access, updating the DIVA 2's software is a breeze, and the content site is easy to navigate. However, at this writing, the content is extremely limited and not always available. In addition, you're supposed to be able to surf to any website, but this function was not working either. Even when it becomes available, entering URLs on the onscreen keyboard will be a big pain in the thumb; another item for the wish list is a physical keyboard (preferably wireless) for surfing the Web and entering file names.

Despite all my complaints, though, I have high hopes for the Malata DIVA 2. With the ability to upgrade its software, I believe many of the problems I encountered can be fixed. If they are, this could be a killer machine.