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What's the Deal With Writeable DVD?
almondjoy notes that, three days ago: "Creative Labs product support tells me they have discontinued their DVD-RAM product line. Is competing specifications really what is destroying momentum of writeable DVD technology into end user systems? Is 'planned obsolescence' the culprit here? All I want to do is dump and/or mix raw mini-DV footage from my digicam onto recordable DVD media. Better yet, I'd like to be able to take that little DV tape and load it into a mini DV drive (is it 4mm DAT?) on my DVD system, and shoot more movies while I'm saving footage to DVD media. I'd also like to make backups of my VMWare guest OS virtual disks to DVD. Wishfull thinking? I did find this nice media compatibility matrix for the different DVD writeable formats, part of the DVD FAQ at DVD Demystified - what a mess!"
I work with DV stuff a lot at the student TV station I work at. We have a Sony DV deck hooked up to a Mac G4 through Firewire; it basically acts as an external "DV drive". You can use it to capture DV media to the computer, and output from the computer to DV, without using your camera. All it takes is a Firewire card, but if you're inputting from a camera you're using Firewire already anyway.
Of course, these things are expensive, but you might look at a Sony DSR-11 or DSR-30 for those purposes. Also, keep in mind, that right now, buying DV media in bulk and using it for archiving is probably actually cheaper than going to DVD writeable media right now. You can get blank DV tapes in bulk, good Sony ones, for under $10 each; I don't think writeable DVDs are anywhere near this, and they won't hold too much more in DV quality than DV tapes do.
DV is also an established standard. Buy a DV deck and it'll still be useful in 5 years. I doubt DVD-RAM will be, esp. with behavior like that from Creative Labs.
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I'm not a real anonymous coward, I just play one on TV.
There are already a few comments here to get a Mac with a superdrive but that dosent really say or answer any questions here.
Apple provides a complete package to do just this sort of thing.
1: Apple's G4 can be ordered with a "Superdrive" that will do CD-Rom, CD-WR, DVD-Rom, DVD-R.
2: The G4 has built-in Firewire ports to connect your digital camera to with ease.
3: Apple bundles for FREE a software package called iMovie that lets you take all your digital footage and make your own home movies, add titles effects, transitions music, etc. Then output it back to your camera in perfect digital quality, OR send the output to their iDVD package.
4: Apple also bundles a superb and easy to use software package called "iDVD" that lets you easily create and burn your own DVDs that are playable in practically any consumer DVD player or computer. If you want more features then the iDVD package you can order "DVD Studio pro" which offers a ton more features for the professional.
Links:
Apple - PowerMac G4 & DVD Authoring
Apple - iMovie
Apple - iDVD
Conclusion:
Since Apple provides every portion of this package (most of them for FREE) you get a nice tightly integrated chunk of software and hardware that all works easily with each other.
Even if you dont like Apple, its OS or its cutesy hardware you cant deny that the simplicity and power of this kind of technology is staggering, considering how inexpesive the computer is compared to a PC with the same hardware specs, software and feature set. Of course theres no guarantee that its all going to work seemlessly on your PC when you get it either.
-HackManColtaire-
hackmanc@mac.com
So..you're whining about DVD-RAM? What reality distortion field did you fucking fall into? DVD-RAM was meant to go obsolete as soon as DVD-R hit the market. It was a go-nowhere product. Wow I can write 4.2GB onto a disk is about an hour and can only play it back on the drive I wrote it with? And that's useful how? Recordable DVDs at this point are a waste of cash, you can fit 4.7 gigs onto a couple CDs for about 3$ on a writer that costs literally a tenth of a DVD-RAM/R. Unfortunately you're suffering the woes of the early adopter, in a couple years DVD-Rs will cost you about a hundred bucks and media will be nearly as cheap as CDs. Don't bitch about it though, its like people whining because they've got SysQ or Fujitsu MO drives. Not all technologies survive the market place dispite cool factor. Shit man I remember being stoked as shit when I got my 1GB Jaz drive, I could back up my entire hard drive on that thing! My friend and I both got a Jaz at the same time and thats how we swapped everything. Woe to us that the disks were neigh 100$. I've bought one extra Jaz disk in my life. I've still got the original Tools disk lying around with the Win95 drivers on it. That was three years and several hard drives and computers ago.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
DVD-RAM specifically is a brain-dead standard. Sure, Hitachi has a camcorder that records directly to (3") DVD-RAMs, but then Sony has a camcorder that records directly to MD-Data2 and that's not going to go anywhere either.
But what you're looking for is DVD-R, and subsequently DVD-RW.
The drives are shipping now, though Apple is consuming 100% of the supply. The drive in question is the DVR-103/DVR-A03, and it can record DVD-R and DVD-RW. Compaq will be shipping the drives soon, and you'll also start seing them in external FireWire enclosures in the next couple of months.
To your specific questions:
All I want to do is dump and/or mix raw mini-DV footage from my digicam onto recordable DVD media.
Remember that DVD-Video is MPEG2, and DV is not. (DV is more closely related to a series of JPEG frames) This means that there will be substantial encoding time if you want to make these discs playable in set-top DVD players.
If all you want to do is archive the DV footage...leave it on the DV tapes. DVD-Rs have only now come down to $10 for a 4.7GB disc, while MiniDV tapes are about $6 for 13GB of storage. I don't know anything about the archival characteristics of DVD-R media, but tape is a known quantity, and since it's digital, you can "refresh" your archive periodically.
Better yet, I'd like to be able to take that little DV tape and load it into a mini DV drive (is it 4mm DAT?) on my DVD system, and shoot more movies while I'm saving footage to DVD media.
You still have the encode time issue above. MiniDV is not 4mm DAT, but Sony does (did? I keep seeing closeouts) make a deck that fits in a 5.25" drive bay. It's called the DRV-100. Internal or not, the interface is still Firewire, so you're better off with an external deck.
I'd also like to make backups of my VMWare guest OS virtual disks to DVD.
No problem. The drive is also a CD-RW machine, so it's a "small matter of software" to get it working burning DVD-ROMs. Toast is already there on the Mac.
-Zandr
You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
The encrypted video format with the disk itself. The layout of tracks/data on a dvd is fairly standardized, and the MPAA has no control over how an end user stores data on the disk, excepting that the end user can't store video in the encrypted format that the MPAA uses. But you can make your own unencrypted dvd video disks and distribute them without paying royalties.
Best Slashdot Co
hard disks
My first unix system was a Radio Shack Model 16 box (first one in Edmonton -- I used to work at the Radio Shack Computer Store). It had dual 8" double sided drives that stored 1 Meg each. The hard drive was an external 14inch, 9Megabyte drive (originally rated for 8, but it had far fewer bad blocks than they expected). I was contracted to get Xenix to run without the hard drive. I managed to get it to boot one one floppy (including swap) with the second floppy drive mountable for storage (and extra programs).
For those of you wondering why, the Hard disk cost $5,000 (that's 1980 dollars).
A REAL floppy disk
I also worked at an IBM Mainframe shop, where some data was still stored on 12" floppy drives... If you want to know where the name for floppy disks came from, imagane the case material used in a 5.25" disk being used for something the size of an old LP. Now that's floppy.
Punch cards About 1979, a friend's dad ran across an interesting problem. Someone at Boeing Timesharing had managed to 'drop' a HUGE stack of computer punch cards. I'm talking a trunk load of these things. They still needed them in card format, and sorted, but it was near the lifetime of Punched cards, and a card punch that could survive that sort of bulk punching attached to a computer that could sort that much data was rare.
The most cost effective solution turned out to be shipping the cards to Edmonton where they were read into the University Of Alberta mainframe (which was available for commercial use -- another story in itself), sorted in memory, punched back out and the new deck shipped back to Seattle (I think). I got told the story when he showed me the original (unsorted) card deck (OK: Pile) in a back room.
Still thinking the old way
A story off the early net... In the early '80s a programmer was asked to write an EMACS macro that could sort the lines of a file according to columbs 72-80. The person who asked him to do it seemed pretty pissed that the functionality wasn't already in emacs.
He dutifully wrote the sort function, and then he found out what it was wanted for...
In the days of punched cards, your card deck would contain sequence numbers in columns 72-80. This was so that when (not if) you dropped your card deck you could simply runit through a mechanical card sorter, and get your deck back in the proper order. These sequence numbers were usually done in increments of 100 or 1000 so that you had room to insert new 'lines' into your program without having to resequence the whole deck. 'Modern' Card punch keyboards could be programmed to sequence cards automagically as you typed them. Language standards (Fortran, Cobol, etc.) were also designed around this necessity.
It seems that the old fogey was so used to punched cards and sequence numbers that he couldn't think of any other way to do this. When the guy wanted to move a couple of lines in the file he would change the sequence numbers and then call the Emacs mscro to sort the file. He never bothered asking if EMACS had a 'move lines' command.
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Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
A DVD disk does not need to contain video data, it can store just plain old data, like a term paper, or games. The DVD video thing is sut one format of DVD that the movie industry controlls right now. The DVD medium it's self isn't controlled by anyone really. Saying the movie industry controlls DVDs is like saying the music industry controlls CDs.\ =\=\=\
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Why did VHS survive over beta?
Two major factors to adoption of a standard include open licensing and first post. DOS and Windows became a standard because they were more open than the Macintosh and UNIX® systems of the time and because Windows had a half-usable GUI before any of the popular Free Software operating systems did. There wasn't much difference between VHS's reproduction quality and Betamax's on consumer TV sets; instead, VHS beat Betamax because of VHS's longer capacity (timeshifting HBO anyone?) and because it was the first to offer adult entertainment.
Digital Betacam, on the other hand, is still in use.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Double density CD-RWs, DVD-R, DVD-RAM. Bah. All of still doesn't compare to the vaporware that I've seen previously posted here on Slashdot. Where's that 140GB FMD-ROM drive? Where's the storage device that uses media in the shape of a cube and holds 1TB or more of data? Isn't secondary storage supposed to be larger and slower than my primary drive? I say stop all development on this tiddly 10GB crap and shoot for the stars. After all, after pr0n, mp3s, DivX DVD rips, and a shitload of anime, my 75GB IBM drive doesn't cut it any more.
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fat lenny's gonna lick your brain today.
I'm sticking with my reliable 5.25" floppies.
Sure you laugh now, but I'll be laughing when the DVD fad dies (just like the CDROM, and 3.5" floppy fads!)!!!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
is that manufacturers are waiting to see how the next generation blue semiconductor lasers pan out before they settle and/or continue with a particular. The shorter wavelength provided by these laser would afford many times more storage on disks of the same physical size. This application has been one of the main driving forces for production of blue semiconductor lasers and since the 100,000 hr mark (minimum requirement of industry for home application semiconductor lasers)has been reached companies have begun to make prototype equipment utilizing these things.
"It's comin' back around again..." -RATM
Hard drives always die sooner or later, usually when you need them most. If you only want to keep your data a few months, then hard drive storage is fine. For 2 or 3 years, duplicating it on two hard drives is usually OK -- but we once lost thousands of JPEG pictures of our manufacturing process to a virus. If you want the data to actually be _safe_, then you've got to have off-line copies -- and it's best to have some of the copies stored somewhere else. If you want to have it ten years from now, then write-once media is a big plus, you need off-line copies that don't lose data with time (floppy disks start losing data in about 8 years, tapes will die sooner without special treatment to keep them from getting brittle), you need to somehow ensure that ten years from now you'll still have a drive that will physically read the media, drivers that understand the format, and for many files you will need an obsolete computer that can run the software to read the data. Many optical formats claim decades of readable life, but only a very popular non-proprietary format will give you a chance of finding a drive in 10 years. CD-R meets that requirement nicely, and because it uses an operating-system independent format, computers in 2011 will still be able to find the files, but it's too damn small. DVD*R* at around 10X the size is a little small, but it would be the best chance we have if they ever settle on a format.
Whether your computer will be able to understand the files depends: I certainly wouldn't count on Word 2011 reading a Word 2000 document, but ASCII will still be around. Databases can be saved in ASCII; you might have to reconstruct the relations and forms to move to new software, but it's a lot better than looking through 10,000 pages of printout to find the cost basis of that piece of equipment... JPEG, MPEG, and HTML will have a good chance of working in backwards compatible viewers. PDF may or may not last. I haven't found any way to keep CAD files up to date for even five years other than continually paying for program updates and transferring all the files to each new version...
If there's a way to make optical drives what they originally were (3.5 times the size of the largest hard drive available), then more power to the manufacturers, but 80GB drives are old news and 240GB optical disks seem unlikely for the moment (and don't tell me about any of these silly vapourware utopian optical storage solutions Slashdot has harped on in the past).
OK, a little information:
Pioneer is releasing a consumer-level DVD-R this month. You can get it for about $800 once it's out.
The fact is, DVD-RAM is not taking off because, simply, it requires a ~$500 drive and is not compatible with DVD, and the average person does not need 5GB of removable storage.
miniDVD is a great idea -- DVD-quality MPEG2 video on a CD-R, but few DVD players are compatible. So even if you make that awesome miniDVD, chances are good that whomever you send it to can't play it in their DVD player (although any computer fast enough to decode the MPEG2 can).
VCD is a cool format (basically a special format of disc with MPEG1 video), and probably 2/3 of DVD players support it, but they are a pain to author, take a long time to encode, and quality is poor (VHS-quality at best).
SVCD is nice quality (not as good as DVD, but definitely better than VHS), but has far less compatibility than VCD in consumer DVD players. Then there's XVCD and XSVCD, a couple of esoteric formats that hardly work on any DVD players.
The final analysis: DVD-R is going to be big, not because it is necessarily the "best", but because it crosses over from computers to consumer electronics, has a large installed base of compatible hardware, and is suitable for a wide variety of tasks, which it will perform very well (data storage, video, etc). Just wait until the DVD-R MP3 players are out...
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Stay in school, kids! Peace out, Dubya
What don't you understand about DVD-RAM and what is non standard about it?? It is almost exactly like a big 5 1/2" floppy There is single density single sided (2.6GB) Single desnity double sided (5.2GB) Double density double sided (4.7GB) Double density Double Sided (9.4GB) You can format the disks anyway you want, and write anything you want on them, pretty simple. It's just like a giant floppy, I love mine. However if you want to make a disk that playes in a dvd player you have to format it UDF, and properly encode the video, Then once the disk is written break it out of it's cart. it should play in any DVD level 3 player (anything made decently in the last 2 years) The trouble comes in explaining to people how to do this. It also comes in mearly explaining all the other DVD standards, DVD-R(Genral), RW, DVD-R(Authoring).