Panasonic going neutral ? I guess not !

[Rio]

All new Panasonic's BD/DVD/HDD recorders and DVD/HDD recorders have build-in H.264 HD encoder. Those are capable of recording HD programs from digital terrestrial/digital satellite to HDD or BD, now even on DVD using H.264 encoder and new format so called "AVCREC". Available selection of bitrate are 12.9Mbps, 8.6Mbps and 5.7Mbps. If 5.7Mbps is chosen, it can record 1 hour 40 min. HD programs on a SL DVD-R, and 18 hours on a DL BD-R.

It's totally irrelevant to the losing format "HD DVD" . AVCREC is a variant of BDAV format, like AVCHD is a variant of BDMV format.

Those recorder can record by H.264 directly from the air, or user can record broadcast HD MPEG2 to the internal HDD first, then let it transcodes to H.264 on demand, or at night (during it being turned off).