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!"

Comments

DV "drive"? Try a deck!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

---
I'm not a real anonymous coward, I just play one on TV.

Product Ignorance.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Going where no webcam has gone before

[Graymalkin]

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.

All this exists...but DVD-RAM ain't it.

[n6mod]

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

Re:All this exists...but DVD-RAM ain't it.

[aussersterne]

As others have pointed out, these are different standards. One (MJPEG) basically compresses individual frames and the other (MPEG) compresses across a flexible series of frames. What hasn't been pointed out, however, is that they are sadly incompatible.

Both are lossy high-compression standards that introduce their own different artifacts into the video stream, meaning that to re-encode MPEG as MJPEG (rare) or to re-encode MJPEG as low-bitrate MPEG for a DVD player (common), you'll get a multiplying effect as all of the artifacts that were nearly invisible to the naked eye in the source stream are suddenly enhanced and magnified as the video stream is re-compressed, especially in high-detail or high-motion segments.

Even worse, because of all the extra "detail" the second encoder sees in the artifacts generated by the first encode, the second compression pass isn't nearly as efficient, using more space for frames that are individually worse in appearance.

Try this. Start with a low-resolution (720x480) photo of high detail and save it as a JPEG at 20% quality. The .JPG version of the original photo has some detectible artifacts, but is likely passable. Now, re-save the .JPG version as a JPEG file again using 20% quality. The second JPEG looks much worse while there has been no compression gain. In fact, the second save will likely use up more space than the first. The effect when encoding MJPEG->MPEG or MPEG->MJPEG is similar, but occurs across multiple frames.

It would be nice if MPEG-2 encoders would drop in price to the point that they could be directly included in camcorders. Footage captured this way could then be directly dumped to media for playback on MPEG-2 players like DVD players without any loss in quality.

You are confusing

[wiredog]

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.

VHS beat beta because it was more open

[yerricde]

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.

Who gives a rats ass?

[Enonu]

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.

One possibility...

[Drakula]

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.

Re:Optical storage has lost its purpose

[markmoss]

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...