Patent ID: 7509031

Claim:
An optical disk recorder comprising: a tuner for receiving television broadcast signals; an encoder for compressing and coding the television broadcast signals received by the tuner; a first buffer for temporarily storing the signals compressed and coded by the encoder; a second buffer to receive the signals stored in and transferred from the first buffer for storing the transferred signals; an optical pickup for writing the signals stored in the second buffer to an optical disk by irradiating a laser beam onto the optical disk; and control means for controlling each of the tuner, the encoder, the first buffer, the second buffer and the optical pickup, wherein for video recording, the control means starts storing signals in the first buffer, and calculates an optimum storage threshold value of the second buffer from: data size of an area on the optical disk in which signals can be written continuously, or data size required for recording a television program; a signal transfer rate from the first buffer to the second buffer; and a signal write rate of the optical pickup to the optical disk, the control means starts storing the signals in the second buffer by transferring the signals stored in the first buffer to the second buffer, and the control means starts writing the signals to the optical disk by the optical pickup while continuing the buffer storage to the second buffer, when the buffer storage amount stored in the second buffer exceeds the optimum storage threshold value, whereby the control means substantially simultaneously ends both the signal transfer from the first buffer to the second buffer and the signal writing by the optical pickup, thereby reducing the write time.