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HP Introduces DVD Recorder
NecroPuppy writes "Hewlett-Packard is introducing the first commercially available DVD recorder, according to this. According to the article, it will be on store shelves in September, and list for $599, and uses the DVD+RW standard." Well, now that I've just bought the supposed to be awesome CD burner from TG (end plug), it might be time to pick this up come September. It'll make backing up a lot easier - since I don't have the Linus method of backing-up.
Looks like great fun, but how much is DVD-RW media going to cost? CD-r discs are around $0.15 if you shop around, and I don't think this is going to be widely adopted if a DVD-RW disc costs $20.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 -- Mathematics is the Language of Nature.
There have always been articles which never make the front page. See the "sections" section to the left of the main page??
The slashdot article is misleading, as it isn't the first commercial DVD recorder, only the first DVD+RW recorder.
Apple has been using a recordable DVD drive by Pioneer for a while, and I'm fairly sure Compaq has as well.
How can it be the first? I've seen a Pioneer DVD Writer last week in a shop nearby (Fnac Brussels City2)
I just noticed this drive while browsing pricewatch.n du strial/IndustrialProductDetails/0,1444,30~3010~301 0300~796,00.html?
http://www.pioneerelectronics.com/Pioneer/CDA/I
600$+ and the Pioneer namebrand media isn't cheap either. a spindle of 50 DVD-RW's was just a few bucks short of the DVD-RW Drive at 609$
I'm not buying now, but I am deffinitely going to wait for all of those "early adopter" and "I'm buying it because I have a small penis" people to buy there share, and pick one up once I don't have to sacrifice my first born child.
Computational Madness in a round package.
lot of complaints, problems, and issues with it, plus you could have gotten it for about $60 cheaper instead of paying out the ass at thinkg**k. shoulda just got a plextor or a lite-on.
That has to be the smartest thing Linus ever said. *lol*
so when the 24x dvd rw coming out.... i dont have 4 hrs to fillup 4 gig at 2x speed. comon u damn r&d bastards... u have em, releasem alredy.
Lizard "Never let them set limits on your mind!"
I read a review of the Pioneer A03 DVD-RW a couple of months ago. (Google's Cache of the page)
The review stated that most new DVD-ROM drives and DVD video players can read these DVD-R disks. A few can also read the DVD-RW standard.
I know what I want for Christmas!
Hehe, couldn't resist, sorry.
Anyway... If I'm reading the article correctly, this isn't the first DVD burner, it's the first DVD rewriter from hp.
Especially since Apple's SuperDrive (pioneer) has been out for a while. Compaq, and others, have also joined recently.
hp does plan to have it in computers by the end of the year, though. That's very cool. Good luck, Carly.
jrbd
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I hate it when computers are smug
Pioneer's drive doesn't do DVD+RW, it does DVD-RW. Different standard...different media. I believe this *is* the first DVD+RW drive.
Well, now that I've just bought the supposed to be awesome CD burner from TG
Not to poo-poo ThinkGeek (I've ordered from them before), but I can get the Sony CRX-1611 16x10x40 CD-RW drive with BurnProof for C$158 (about US$99) at several local computer stores here in Toronto (although one is my favourite).
And to think you paid twice as much, plus shipping... ouch...
Why, in the requirements section, does it require, "A 16x or faster cdrom drive"?
but with so many standards out there (e.g. DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, DVD+RW,... etc.) which will prevail in the long run? A better choice would probably be one of the ones by LaCie or QPS, which they showed at TechXNY, the ones which are a combination DVD-RW/DVD-R/CD-RW/CD-R drive. I don't think they'll be much more than the HP.
This drive is far from the first DVD recorder on the market. Pioneer has had their A03 out for months. And before that there were high-end professional units. Apple has included the Pioneer DVD-R drive (A03) for months and I think that ComPaq is also shipping a version.
Now it is possible that the drive from HP is the first for the DVD+RW (instead or the DVD-R or DVD-RW) standard. But it is not the first DVD recordable drive by far.
==Paul
For those of you too lazy to click the link:
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it."
- Linus Torvalds
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
It's actually quite a serious thing to plug a company owned by your own parent corporation, without giving explicit notice of that fact, or making the plug an advertisement.
But this is Slashdot, where none of that applies...
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
er... tell me if i'm wrong but haven't there been DVD Recorders around for quite some time? this link to an austrian computer store tells me that there are already DVD recorders for about $700. or is the HP recorder one with which i can also recorde TV shows?
".Sig Stealer" was here
that's one of the worst things I have ever seen...
Please do not follow this link if you are under 18. If you are 18 or older, please prove it by sending your credit card details to:
me@slashdot.org
Apple Super Drive - DVD Recorder - been around about 6 months or so - www.apple.com\superdrive (Approx $999 i think, included with G4 macs)
_ recorder/default.asp (designed admittedly for media creators)
Panasonic Sell a DVD recorder for TV use etc - http://www.panasonic.com/consumer_electronics/dvd
Pioneer have several models (including one with UNIX drivers) - http://www.proh.com/DVD-Recorders.shtml ($820 SRP)
And thats just a quick search - HP are hardly the first consumer level and the pioneer has been out 6 months - add to this offerings by phillips and sony due out soon and you have a bad claim to HP - i dont mean to flame but can we check stories first - even a 5 minute web search would have proven the claim wrong and stopped the hundreds of posts pointing out the error
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
I have three words for you:
Slashdot sucks ass !
Yeeaaah !
http://www.pioneer-eur.com/products/multimed/optic al/dvrA03.htm
Just incase anyone is interested, the DVD+RW specs are here.
;).
Also, from the little I have read on zdnet it appears that DVD+RW is promising, being usable for video, data, etc. although not officially sanctioned by the DVD Forum (but with backers like HP, Phillips, Ricoh, Sony, Thomson MM, Verbatim, and Yamaha who needs the damn DVD Forum
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
$599 is just the street price : this Google search lists shops that will propose it at 3-7% lower prices.
When will we ever have something to record live feed TV though, and keep it around. Tivos machines are nice, and all, but I need to record Jay and Silent Bob when it first premires on the boob tube. That way I can dig out Katz' review out of the dust and laugh myself stupid again... (You are going to keep doing reviews, right Katz?) ;)
I just bought 2 from one of the shops listed there.
Thanks Dude
Amongst the posts in this article I have seen a large degree of confusion.
HP have released a DVD+RW writer device, this writes DVDs. It is not just a DVD reader which writes CD-R or CD-RW. I assume that this device can also write CD-R and CD-RW, but it is more than that, hence the higher price tag.
Enjoy Y2K? Roll-on Year 2037!
Philips
has anybody noticed the ad in hotmail inbox:
"can't find your feet with computers?"
take a look at the kids legs.
The MPAA or who-ever is in charge will keep the media prices high after DeCSS. I don't see any other reason why they should be expensive, yes i know cdrs were but thats different, dvdrs are probably produced in the same factories with little modification to the machinery (anyone know about this?). Anyway, dvd sucks - 1.44 floppy for many people was replaced by cd-r: 1.44Mb vs. 640Mb is a big difference. 640Mb vs. 4-5Gb dvd is not. What happens in about 4 years when 4Gb is worth nothing? or when HDTV _finally_ makes an appearance but no-one can fit it on their disks (with out compressing it down or shrinking the image lol)
-tfga
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Me personally I will wait untill the cost of the blanks drop below $5.00 US. By then the price of the recorders will have, hopefully, dropped significantly
is that theres so many to choose from :)
Those buttheads insisted on including CPRM buggery, which makes it as useless as a DAT tape deck IMNSHO.
Of course, if they thoughtfully made it easy to defeat by cutting a PC board trace or soldering a jumper on somewhere, I'd buy one in a heartbeat.
Still, for $1600 dollars, I want something that works for ME, not for Jack Valenti.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
That's *expensive*. I have the same drive, bought here in Europe, except it's the scsi-3 version. I paid $180 for it.. TG "our price" for the scsi version is 279.99 so I guess the IDE version is equally overpriced.
http://www.bestbuy.com/detail.asp?e=11071171&m=488 &cat=511&scat=514
DVD-R disk is $11.99
DVD-RW disk is $14.99
Get a free ipod.
If you want a ~$600 DVD recorder, you already have a couple of other choices.
At $629 on PriceWatch, the Pioneer DVR-A03 that a number of posters have already mentioned writes DVD-R at 2X, DVD-RW at 1X, as well as CD-R and CD-RW.
At $535 on PriceWatch, the Panasonic LF-D311 writes DVD-R at 1X and DVD-RAM (1X for 2.6GB, 2X for 4.7GB), as well as reading the usual CD formats, but apparently not writing any CD format whatsoever.
Currently, to the best of my knowledge, the only Linux software that can drive DVD writes is proprietary (sorry, there really is no good link for it). I am not sure whether complete information on how to drive these DVD writes is given in the SCSI-3 standards on www.t10.org or whether some additional information is needed. Any pointers to this information would be appreciated, as I might get ambitious one of these days and try to hack cdrecord or cdwrite to control these drives if nobody beats me to it.
That's bullshit! I've see a DVD burner on the Best Buy website for a while. Let's see Best Buy. Only $800. They even sell the media (which isn't cheap).
I assume the cdrom drive is to install drivers for the dvd drive. not sure why 16x would be required tho, other than maybe a computer with a slower drive would more than likely not be up to snuff for a dvd-rw drive
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
A DVD-Recorder has been in the market for some time now. It uses the DVD-RW, and not DVD+RW. Can't tell you which is better but it the point is that HP didn't release the first DVD-Recorder.
More info on the pioneer drive can be found here: http://www.pioneerelectronics.com/Pioneer/CDA/Indu strial/IndustrialProductDetails/0,1444,796,00.html .
The new drive will enter the mess that is the DVD rewritable market. Three competing standards--DVD+RW, DVD-RW and DVD-RAM--are vying for market supremacy, confusing compatibility issues and keeping prices high.
I'm glad to see the technology emerging in the consumer market, but I won't touch this sh!t until these standards issues are worked out. Somewhere, my Beta player is weeping.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
1. It's slow...remember how fast CDRW drives increased in their respective speeds? Give the DVD-R drives a few months, and they will be writing at 8x or better.
2. It's expensive...as with any new technology, this one is gonna break you if you buy it too soon. Again, wait a few months, and the price will be half of what it is now.
3. Too many standards...this wasn't ever really a problem with CD-RW, but the problem has existed elsewhere. With all this crap about DVD-RW and DVD+RW, a pair of incompatible standards that provide no real advantage over each other, one is best advised to just wait for one technology to disappear, and then buy the prevalent one. This should also happen during the next 4-6 months, as demand increases.
I noticed in an advert the other day for some DVD-RAM disks for sale... $50 CAN (~$30 US)
Who is going to pay $50 for something that only holds 5.2gb when you could get that for $5 CAN with regular CD's? Does a regular DVD Drive even read RAM disks?
An optimist believes we live in the best world possible; a pessimist fears this is true.
...not two.
(Score:-1,Splitting Hairs)
Will it be against the dmca to use an unapproved driver when accessing dvd-rw's? You might not want to rely on a proprietary storage format for your data storage, as you will be at the mercy of the proprietary technology holder, should he remotely upgrade the device which rendures it unuseable.
I'll bet dvd-rw's will be 5X+ higher cost than cd-r's, but hey.. Jack Valenti needs to get paid.
At one point, Linus had implemented device files in /dev, and wanted to dial up the university computer and debug his terminal emulation code again. So he starts his terminal emulator program and tells it to use /dev/hda. That should have been /dev/ttyS1. Oops. Now his master boot record started with "ATDT" and the university modem pool phone number. I think he implemented permission checking the following day.
Best Slashdot Co
Am I the only one who doesn't like the fact that they are selling "dvd writers" that only write 4.7gb? dvd's are capable of holding 17gb. You wouldn't have bought a cd writer if it only held 150mb would you?
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
This was on MSN.com this Monday. Get with it Slashdot. Oh wait, you probably had the story on Monday but your Open Source database kept crashing. Perhaps it's time to upgrade to a real database. Might I suggest SQL Server 2000.
Nuff said
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Right now the appeal for something like this may be the types who download movies of the net. I tried to get into it once I got my cable access and I'm sorry but to be honest it is cheaper to go out and but the damn movie. I look at the amount of time I wasted trying to find a link that works or someone who is actually allowing downloads on Gnutella and for that amount of time I could spend in much better ways.
Now data backup.... Would it be faster than tape, if so great.
how is that the first commercially available DVD burner? I've had my DVD-R firewire drive for awhile now and it is not yet September
Hello? I bought the first SureStore for over $1100. It never worked and HP refused to repair or replace it. Their printers are fine - I would steer clear of the rest.
...elaborate bytes (makes of clonecd) comes out with clonedvd :P
Apple Super Drive - DVD Recorder - been around about 6 months or so - www.apple.com\superdrive (Approx $999 i think, included with G4 macs)
_ recorder/default.asp (designed admittedly for media creators)
Panasonic Sell a DVD recorder for TV use etc - http://www.panasonic.com/consumer_electronics/dvd
Pioneer have several models (including one with UNIX drivers) - http://www.proh.com/DVD-Recorders.shtml ($820 SRP)
And thats just a quick search - HP are hardly the first consumer level and the pioneer has been out 6 months - add to this offerings by phillips and sony due out soon and you have a bad claim to HP - i dont mean to flame but can we check stories first - even a 5 minute web search would have proven the claim wrong and stopped the hundreds of posts pointing out the error
Anything available at CompUSA is a disgraceful subject for 'new technology' at Slashdot. I'm embarrassed for us all
http://www.compusa.com/media/ad_pdfs/pg8.pdf
The Firewire version transfers data at 15MB/Sec according to the Iomega site (a USB version is available as well.) Here is the link
http://www.dvdjukebox.com/
Talk about m4d 3r337!
Sounds great. CD-Rs are just too small for backup, and nothing else is rugged enough. I'm using an external USB hard drive that I got dirt cheap now, but although it's fairly big (20G) it's slooooowwwwww.
Also, I can copy all my home videos over from VHS-C to DVD before the tape disintegrates. (No doubt in 20 years I'll be copying them to new media for the 5th time, probably to molecular-torsion memory or something).
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
I have yet to really do anything with DVD stuff. Not only is it not entirely HDTV compatible (they must have forgotten that we're all supposed to be switching to that from NTSC, just like everybody else), the whole business with the DVD Forum has rubbed me the wrong way. If I'm going to import anime, I don't want to have to import a new DVD player as well. My laserdisc player handles foreign media just fine. (Too bad they're leaving that standard, though). As for renting movies, my VCR still works. Even if I end up getting a PS2 or an Xbox, I don't see myself spending money on DVD movies.
However, DVD+RW seems to be a format in which they've done everything right. If I were to get a DVD recorder, I'd want something that can be played on most normal players, be it a movie player or a DVD-ROM drive. DVD-R and DVD-RW can't promise that, and DVD-RAM is really just a gloriefied tape drive with its proprietary sealed cases. On top of that, this bad boy will write CD-R and CD-RW as well. I get this and a normal DVD-ROM drive and I can copy damned near anything. The only problem I see here is that, once somebody figures out how to record dual-layer discs (so you can record discs the same size as the commercial plants), that will probably entail yet another standard.
But, again, I have no use for a DVD player, and only marginal use for a DVD-ROM drive. DVD+RW would be nice in that it hold a metric fuckload of data, but do I really have that much to hold? (OK, maybe I will when I live someplace they have broadband again) Is there a reason for me to need this instead of a normal CD-RW?
The apple DVD-R does not employ CSS and is limited to 1G (IIRC). apparently this means that you don't get as much for $10, record once, smaller size and your stuff is not as important to protect.
the HP DVD-RW is rewritable (no kidding, eh?), $15, 4.7G(?) but is CPRM, digital encryption between the wires, clickwrap DMCA agreement, stray packets traced to mpaa.com/org, DVD comet cursor(?) included in there somewhere?
You see, for some reason, I find it difficult to believe there is not some catch/hidden agenda.
Moose.
Knowledge w/o application is pointless,
Application w/o knowledge is fruitless, but,
learning is still possible.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Panasonic had the first "consumer" DVD-R at under $1000, the DVR-A03. You can find it at Best Buy for a rather high $799, or find it on Pricewatch.com for $620. Blank DVD-R disks are $7 each online.
:-)
My strike price is about $400 which is high, but considering I have a *bazillion* mp3s it is still cost-effective (factoring in TIME). The REAL "killer app" for DVD-R will be mp3 players that read the disk. Currently DVD players that do MP3's, only do so off of an ISO-9660 CD. THAT is a crying shame. An Apex 5-DVD changer with 25GB of MP3's would just be too much fun...
This information isn't super-secret... the reason Slashdot credits HP is because most Slashdot publishing is "headline based", with research about as deep as a beer cap. Not only has the Panasonic been available for MONTHS (and shipping inside certain Apple models), but even that was not the first DVD-R -- there were various drives for the last few years at about the US$5,000 mark.
Please, Slashdot, the moderation system already sucks. At least do a 30-second Google to make sure your facts are OK. (FWIW - I'm one of the "original" users #54xx and I will not moderate because, because the criteria for being selected is NOT how well you moderate, it is HOW OFTEN YOU POST [this does WONDERS for signal-to-noise... duh!] )
-Scott
Plextor is the best drive. They now have a 24X write version, and the computer stores are starting to sell 24X certified CD-R blank media.
Bush's education improvements were
And what do you think Apple has been shipping for 6 months now? A DVD-R which burns DVDs, CD-Rs and CD-RWs. Old freakin news.
Looks like this new one is a DVD-RW, and THAT is the difference that is confusing people.
Christ, sometimes I wish I could reach into my monitor and slap some of these people
HP has several devices on the market that have no manufacturer supported Linux drivers. This might be good for backups, but only if it's useable.
I think that HP's assessment of the Linux market is defined by their announcement yesterday of a $3,000 version. They see Linux as being for servers. Consumer items may well get a very short shrift.
My guess is the Linux support is out of a totally separate division from the consumer stuff. Abd the two groups either don't talk, or are rivals.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It seems to me that the Plextor and Yamaha drives get a lot of praise from people. I was just wondering which is better?
You know, this is great and all considering that Apple has been selling their High-end G4 towers with DVD Recorders for, oh, the last 6 months, and you can buy them separately as an OEM part and use them in any other machine.
Or is this about DVD+RW? If so, the title would do well to be changed to 'Blah blah introduced first DVD Re-Writer'.
.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
With my current setup I can get close to 40 minutes of DVD quality video on a CD-R disc with SVCD encoding, with a DVD+RW I could fit almost 5 hours of DVD quality video on one DVD disk. This if your DVD player support SVCD format (you can find out at VCD Helper)
For those of "us" that already have FireWire and a digital video camera, I say bring it on!
This is not the sig line you are looking for... -- Old Jedi Sig Line Trick
"The media for the new drive, which HP also plans to sell, will cost $15.99 per disc."
Amazon's best-selling movie DVDs seem to average around $21-$22 each. That price relative to $16 for blank media sounds like it could be a factor in the success of their DVD+RW's. The movie industry can't be happy about this, although they must realize cheap, writable DVDs are inevitable.
I needed storage for a bunch of files, and I evaluated all the DVD formats and came to the conclusion that, unless you have a huge storage needs or specifically need the DVD format - good old hard-drives make better sense. You don't have to break your data up in ~4 gig chunks, they are fast and cheap, and no special software/drivers are needed:
I needed one half a Terabyte of storage:
DVD-Drive @ $600 + 100 DVD Disks at $10 each = $1600
7 IDE Drives and Drive Caddies @ $140 + $20 = $1120
Considering my time is valuable (well not too valuable, otherwise I wouldent be here at Slashdot), babysitting the DVD drive seemed like a pain.
Of course we DVD will scale better, and your needs may vary. I already have backups of the files, so the fact that IDE drives can be flaky diden't bother me.
At one Terabyte, the story changes and DVD's look better, but start to look silly compaired to tape drives.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
The high-end PowerMacs have DVDR-CDRW drives too I believe. Not sure who makes the drives though.
According to rumor, you can't (easily) record other video than home movies on to the Apple/Panasonic DVD burner. Do we know anything about the restrictions in this one?
The press release says this, which sounds pretty free to me.
the HP DVD-writer dvd100i drive enables users to create DVDs from their own videos using the DVD+RW format. Users also can transfer analog or digital video directly from a camcorder or VCR to a DVD disc(Requires separately purchased video capture and compression hardware for download of video to PC), create and play digital music CDs and store large amounts of data safely and securely on both CD and DVD media.
first commercially available DVD recorder,
I walked into my show a couple of weeks ago, and they told me they had the DVD burner that belonged with the dvd writable media. No problem.
Price: Around $600.
Roger.
You bought it from ThinkGeek? Tsk, tsk -- Taco, you paid too much.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
If you want to play back a DVD home movie, you would need to encrypt it, i.e. ReCCS
If a DVD disc initializes a player's CSS encryption shift registers to 00000000's, it won't attempt to decrypt the data on the disc. Consumer DVD-R's with zeroes in the player key sections. Therefore, you just need to multiplex MPEG-2 video with AC-3 audio (good luck getting patent licenses for all this) and record it to the DVD as .vob files.
Will I retire or break 10K?
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Can be found here.
Perhaps when a post is moderated to and above +3
Better yet, they could actually solve the problem, by parsing for and removing the javascipt shenanigans that made links suspect in the first place. Besides being ugly, the safety-link is no help if the author links to Google's cache or anonymizer.com or some random IP.
Pioneer has a dvd-r/rw and cd-r/rw combo here at Best Buy for $799. Therefore, HP is not the first.
As long as (which others have already said) there are more than one standard and nobody yet knows which standard will be the one that wins the race, I'm not buying.
Here is a quote from a faq:
There are six recordable versions of DVD-ROM: DVD-R for General, DVD-R for Authoring, DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and DVD+R. All recordable drives can read DVD-ROM discs, but each uses a different type of disc for recording. DVD-R and DVD+R can record data once (sequentially only), while DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, and DVD+RW can be rewritten thousands of times. DVD-R was first available in fall 1997.
DVD-RAM followed in summer 1998. DVD-RW came out in Japan in December 1999, but won't be available elsewhere until mid or late 2001. DVD+RW will be available in late 2001 or early 2002. DVD+R will be available in mid 2002.
From what I have read in the faq, CD+RW looks to be the kind of drive you should buy (this HP drive is such a drive).
To quote:
/dev, and wanted to dial up the university computer and debug his terminal emulation code again. So he starts his terminal emulator program and tells it to use /dev/hda. That should have been /dev/ttyS1. Oops. Now his master boot record started with "ATDT" and the university modem pool phone number. I think he implemented permission checking the following day."
"At one point, Linus had implemented device files in
I laugh. It's nice to know that I'm not the first one to mess up the mbr. I just wish I had read this before executing this command:
# dd of=/dev/hda if=/dev/fd0
Now, that was *supposed* to back up the MBR to a floppy disk in case it ever got corrupted. Needless to say, "in case" happened and the backup didn't.
--Jon
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Personally, I think DirectCD and Easy CD Creator are sucky programs. I like Hotburn Pro much better, but since Iomega bought Asimware, it's not available for sale. I hope Iomega doesn't make it sucky like all their other software.
</RANT>
I've been following the DVD writing market for a while now, and I'm interested in seeing how this competition between the DVD-R/DVD-RW standard and the DVD+RW standard. I've read here several times already the opinion that the competing formats will slow the adoption of DVD writing.
My question is: Why?
There seems to be some kind of industry FUD being thrown around that these drives are "incompatible." How so? Both write to media that can be read in either an industry-standard home DVD player or an industry-standard DVD-ROM drive. There is some worry going around that DVD-R media can not be read by 100% of the home DVD players out there, but I think this is being largely overblown by the industry (particularly the DVD+RW) people. Hell, my old CD player gags on CD-R media ... does that mean I should sign up with a new standard created by a consortium of big corporations, like DVD+RW?
But leave the home players aside for a moment. Let's say that I buy a DVD-R burner (and I have), and you buy a DVD+RW burner. Both of our burners also function as DVD-ROM drives, right? So if I burn a DVD-R and give it to you, you will be able to read it on your DVD+RW burner. If you burn a DVD+RW and give it to me, I will be able to read it in my DVD-R burner. Or, if for some reason it doesn't work -- say the drives are "touchier" than most -- then we can still slap the things into some other DVD-ROM drive, and read them there.
The drives are not "incompatible." This is just a gross overstatement, coupled with with marketing spin from the DVD+RW people who want to edge out DVD-R. Sure, their blank media formats are incompatible. You and I won't be able to trade blanks. But, ultimately ... so what?
Seems to me we should be investigating things like the licensing terms for each format, roadmap for future development (if they come up with a dual-layer blank, who will get it first?), industry tactics, who's making deals with the RIAA and MPAA, who's going to be able to offer lower cost sooner, etc. When we get informed about that, then we can put our money where our opinions are, and encourage the industry to support the format that's best for US.
Breakfast served all day!
I just want a DVD-RW that will record off of my CABLE (digital or otherwise) so I can record the simpsons (and other shows). and not have to worry about the quality of the recording degrade so quickly. Or a Tivo that has one of these puppies.
Pioneer was the first to make the drive, Apple was the first computer company to start selling them. Though, the way ZDNet is most of the time, I'm not at all surprised about this article. They frequently ignore Apple.
I've been writing DVD-R's for months (write-once data or video), and DVD-RW's for about a month, using the SuperDrive in my PowerMac (it's a Pioneer drive that also does CD-RW). The DVD-R discs are $10 each (from Apple, in boxes of 5), hold 4.7GB of data, and take about 20 minutes to write. I got rid of my slow tape drive and its expensive and fragile tapes, and now I have backups that are easy to access and will last longer (cheaper, too ... paid for itself). I also have my portfolio on DVD video discs. Very easy to get pro results with Apple's software (the interface is the hardest part).
So, the HP drive has a "+" in between DVD and RW instead of a "-". For video DVD's, you need authoring software, and Apple has been selling that in spades for months now, also Compaq, using Pioneer's drive. The HP DVD+RW makes me think of USB 2.0, which is only amazing if you don't already use or know about the overwhelming popularity of FireWire. What does the DVD+RW media cost? Where can you get it? Does the drive come with authoring software? If not, then making DVD video discs is only a theoretical possibility. Yes, the drive can write the data (any DVD drive can), but there is so much more to it than that.
Apple has had their DVD-R drives co-produced with Pioneer for over 6 months.
They're a build to order option, and media is approximately $20/DVD.
Just to let someone know that HP wasn't first this time either.
Adam
Interesting. I just ejected the tray on my 24X Plextor, and the groove is there for the small CD-Rs. Are you saying the Plextor software does not support the small CD-Rs?
Bush's education improvements were
You heard me. Cunt.
When I bought my Mac G3/400 in 1998, it came with a DVD-R.
The current macs come with DVD-R's as well. Dont you slashdorks know about Apple Computer, Inc?
Summary:
DVD+RW is the only format that is able to properly record fully DVD-Video compatible MPEG-2 with Variable Bit Rate (VBR) encoding.
Basically, if you want to make DVD-Video disks with the full DVD-Video quality, you can either use DVD+RW or send your incompatible DVD-RW disks to a shop for some very expensive mastering into actual DVD-Video.
Now, for people who think SVCDs with 2.5 Mbit/s is OK, this really is not much of an issue. But real DVD-Video uses VBR with a maximum transfer rate of up to 10 Mbit/s. I personally want to author my DVD-Video disks with material filmed with my miniDV handycam without having to reduce the resolution and the transfer rate.
DVD-RW seems to have added a "DVD-Video compatible" mode because of the specs that DVD+RW presented, but the DVD-RW "compatible" mode comes with several drawbacks. Constant Bit Rate, for one.
DVD+RW provides both DVD-Video backward compatibility and high-performance data recording. For me, that sounds like the best of both worlds. Now I just need to decide which drive to get, Philips or HP.