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A Drive With The Works: DVD-[R,RW] And CD-[R,RW]
grub writes: "The MPAA must be saying "Ho Lee Fook."
Pioneer had introduced a
rewritable DVD drive. The drive reads and writes in four formats: DVD-R, CD-R, DVD-RW and CD-RW, has up to 4.7GB capacity per DVD side and records on DVD-R at twice the normal speed."
With 60GB drives now at reasonable prices, and drives three times that size coming out on the high end, 4.7GB no longer sounds like the mountain of bits it once did. Still, this is a wild combination: hopefully the world will soon agree on some nice DVD-RAM standards worth living with.
I swear. You mention dvd burning and everyone's minds immediately jumps to copyright infringement. Most people are missing the fact that we are getting close to REPLACING TAPE DRIVES. Finally. A form of backup that has, though half the size, far more speed than your normal tape drives. Now, i am not saying we are ready to get rid of those old pieces of crap yet, but we are close. I am not sure, but i imagine that the 4.7 gb is only on the dual-sided disks, and i imagine too that you have to flip the disc to write to both sides. So it is still just a 2.xx gb automated backup solution, but thats a heluva lot better than 650 mb!! Now stepping away from the business world and into the desktop realm, think about the size of your average hard drive. Personally i use 14.2 gb out of my 40.6 gb of hard drive space. Most of that though is game fluff that needs to be reinstalled anyways everytime i reformat my windows partition. (i couldve shortened my sentence by saying i reinstall my games every weekend... cron job anyone?). Anyways, the problem with ghosting is that it takes a LOT of space to get, not only the default windoze install, but also all the extra programs and tweaking that comes along with it everytime i reinstall. But now i dont have to store that img on my hard disk, i can store it on a dvd, and still have room to throw in some of the fluff like saved games, mp3's, etc. Basically all i am saying is to stop trying to burn dvd's for a few years. If you cant afford the $20 per dvd, then how did you afford the player???
Of course the MPAA should be getting frightened about DIVX and the new DVD to CD-R Video devices being launched.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
This
A few of these
AMD 760 MP
Two of these
A fridge with a padlock
Oh yeah, and huge pectoral muscles!
Unless you count the way I drive in my Highway 17 commute, in which case anthracite is just fine.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
That's easy enough to deal with. You write unencrypted content. Problem solved.
Problem not solved.
Your player won't play unencrypted content. It will look for the content code, which will return the zeros. It will then refuse to play the disc.
Unless you play with the firmware or software, and unlike Region Codes, there's very little inroads which have been made into supplying replacement firmware or software capable of playing consumer written DVD content [obviously these would be underground efforts - like with console games, producing any DVD content involves licensing from those who intented the system - the MPAA].
OSS will likely be one of the first players to support consumer produced, backup, and pirate DVD content if enough [that fits into the first two categories] is produced.
Mike
I used to work for a Video Post Production
facility and we had a Pioneer DVD Burner and
Authoring software for the PC (not sure
exactly what, it wasn't my area).
We could author DVD's just fine with this setup
that would play on standalone DVD players or
on Computers with DVD drives. It was common
for clients to ask for copies of their commercials
on DVD and we could provide them no problem.
I believe you can choose to author an unencrypted
regionless DVD (which is what we were doing) and
players will play them fine.
I think we're going to need a better menuing system.
Alakaboo
However, as devices like this one come out and get more popular, it will cause the demand for blank DVDs to increase. This will naturally lead to a drop in price.
Consider this: A a few years ago, blank CDs were going for about $5/pop. Now you can get them in bulk for about fifty cents each. Given enough time the same thing will happen with blank DVDs.
This is why the MPAA was so incensed over the DeCSS. They were looking ahead to when blank DVDs would be much less expensive than those with content put out by the studios. Whether or not this is good/bad/or otherwise, I'll leave to the reader.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
DVDRs have certain portions of the disk already written to as part of their production companies licensing deal with the MPAA. The bits required for the disk key are already prewritten with zeroes.
You can't burn an exact copy of a DVD to a DVDR, and your inexact copy won't play in most peoples DVD drives.