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The State of Recordable DVD's
An anonymous reader writes: "The Tech Report has a review of two DVD writers, one from each of the two competing standards (DVD-R and -RW and DVD+RW). In addition to testing the performance of each drive, they also test a bunch of DVD players and DVD-ROM drives to see how well they read the different types of media."
The author of this review also spends quite a bit of time kvetching about the writing software that comes with burners. My advice? Junk it all! Get a copy of Nero. It supports XP, DVD drives, rewritable CDs and DVDs, and has a packet-writing software avaliable. It's also bloody fast and astoundingly reliable. (Blatent Plug, but it's true.)
This flies in the face of science.
I love my JVC DVD+RW. And I haven't found a dvd unit yet that is not able to play the recorded ROMs. However, I have notice older players that had the layer switching problems, really take a long time to make the jump from one layer to the next, and my oldest DVD player (an APEX) doesn't even make an attempt.
I've found that http://www.vcdhelp.com is a great site for anything dvd related. They also have a searchable matrix that includes heaps of useful information on players and recorders.
-- Mike wildcard@illuminatus.org
A lot of confusion could be cleared if people would stop referring to DVD+RW as a recordable DVD format.
For more info, see my FAQ.
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
Computer manufacturers came up with a format that is optimized for data storage and uses a disc similar to DVD. This format is called DVD+RW, which is disengenuous at best as discs produced by these systems cannot be called DVD.
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
This is a huge problem. I've been thinking about getting a DVD player for the last 6 months or so, but there's a huge problem with figuring out which features do what. This DVD FAQ helped quite a bit. I've got to have one by the time Gigantic comes out, and I need to be able to play MP3 (oog would be great too) on it. What to do... what to do...
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check out the interactive web assistants at verbots.com.
you really can't compare D-VHS to VHS... the reason the VHS loses quality is because it is analog... the D-VHS is digital. it shouldn't wear out at all.
I used to be a television production major and we would re-use our digital tapes for years with no degradation at all... these weren't D-VHS, but they were still 'tape' based digital media, and would retain broadcast quality stuff forever it seemed.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Digital tapes do wear, but the error correction helps mask it. If you ever actually work in production, you rarely re-use digital tapes even when they cost $100+ per unit. Any engineer will tell you its a bad idea to re-use them for storing any master. When they do wear out, you start to notice concealment rates skyrocket on the devices that let you view the graphs. If a professional production house were to send that out to a client as a master, that would be a coffin nail.
Go buy an Acme RoadRunner DVD RW+ drive, whose media is $1.35/10 gb disc.
What? you can't use recorded discs in your dvd player? well it's okay, we called it a "recordable dvd format" even though it can't be played back in a dvd drive.
Since the RoadRunner performs as advertised, no refund allowed.
THAT'S why its important.
I don't know what DVD player you have, but my DVD-RAM media won't work anywhere else
My DVD-RAM uses a square plastic caddy like old CDROM drives. The difference is that every DVD-RAM media has it's own caddie and the caddie is supposed to be permenant... it contains the read-write tab like floppy disks have, etc.
You can sorta get around this...
Take a DVD RAM cartridge and *carefully* crack it open. You can take out the DVD disc and if you wrote a disc with a digital movie some DVD set tops will work with it. There are not many though (more sets will read the DVD+RW or -RW than a cracked DVD-RAM). This is probably why you don't see them... you can't exactly put the disc+cartridge in a DVD player and most people then turn away from them, and cracked discs don't ever work real well. And as the article said, mor ppl are expected to use them in set tops than for data
I don't know if you can put a standard DVD-/+R(W) in the cartridge and use it. If you look at the DVD-RAM disc, the coding is much different in appearence from the other standard disc's
I have a Creative DVD-RAM, which I have been pretty pissed at. Looking on the data side, of the backups I have done, I have always had files lost during the backup write. The only advantage it had was I got it pretty cheap (about $250 2 years ago)
- Sig
However, nothing I could find on the DVD Forum site mentioned that the word "DVD" could not be used to describe non-Forum-approved products. There's no trademarks applied to the word "DVD", AFAIK. In any case, it's merely a legal distinction, not a functional one. It certainly hasn't stopped all the various manufacturers of DVD+RW products from calling them DVDs, even though those companies are members of the DVD Forum as well.
Given that DVD+RW discs work like DVDs, store video & data like DVDs, and are at least as compatible with DVD-Video players & DVD-ROM drives as DVD-RW discs (and far more so than DVD-RAM discs), I think people are entitled to call them DVDs. If it quacks like a duck, etc.
However, Forum-approved DVD-R discs remain the most compatible current writable format (at least until DVD+R is available), due to the different reflectivity of both RW formats. DVD-RAM discs cannot be read by anything except a DVD-RAM drive, so I don't think it counts, regardless of whether it has a DVD logo or not.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
From the press release:
I always wondered what happened to this technology. Looks like it might finally arrive :-)
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
If you haven't already, try this. Your kid won't notice the difference, and CD-Rs are dirt cheap. You also get to cut out the spam^H^H^H^Hpromos that Di$ney likes to put at the beginning of each DVD.
(Odds are you'd need the same techniques to rip the source DVD and reencode it to fit on a burnable DVD (assuming the original is >4.7GB...maybe stripping out extra languages and such would reduce the size enough for some movies).)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
I'm sure you're aware the first season of the Simpsons is now available on DVD, with the second season due in May.
What's more, I recently bought the first seasons of Futurama and Family Guy, in London - Region 2 only.
Why were they released in Region 2 first, when they're far more known & popular in Region 1? Who knows. Still looking for The Young Ones though.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Given all the other advantages that DVD+R/RW has (greater compatibility, more flexible recording, faster recording, background formatting, etc etc), Panasonic are going to have to drop the prices on the DVD-RW units even more to stay in the market, IMHO.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I own both a DVD-RAM and a DVD+RW (a Philips DVDRW208, the exact model as the second drive in the review), and use them primarily for data storage. This rant starts with some DVD-RAM history and moves on to the DVD+RW, so if you're only interested in the latter, skip down a ways.
I got the DVD-RAM some years back, with the intent of using it as a shared data medium between a Windows machine and a Linux machine (running kernel 2.2.5 or so, IIRC). At that time, I had been using a PD (Phase Dual, the DVD-RAM precursor), and since the DVD-RAM dirve I was interested in (a SCSI Panasonic LF-D101) also had support for PD cartridges, it was a natural step up. It worked pretty much exactly as advertised, except that at one point, I reformatted one of the discs (with FAT32) in such a way that for some reason Linux was never able to mount it again, though Windows had no problem with it. Reformatting it from one OS or the other resulted in the opposing OS being unable to read it, so I eventually formatted it ext2fs and used it to make direct backups that didn't require tar to keep permissions and such. It was slow, and it was a little clunky, but it got the job done pretty well.
A short while ago, I upgraded the kernel on that particular Linux machine to 2.4.18, and got a bit of a surprise -- it was no longer possible to reformat the discs, although they did mount rw and I was able to manipulate the data. Well, I had been looking at DVD+RW for some time, had eventually decided on the Philips model as the best of the bunch, and when I saw it for sale online, I ordered it.
Okay, the people interested in DVD+RW stuff can start reading again
The DVD+RW dropped into the new (dual boot Windows 98/Linux 2.4.19-pre2) system quite nicely, although I do recall from reading other people's experiences that it much preferred being the slave drive on an IDE chain. This suited me fine, as I already had an IDE DVD-ROM (AOpen 1640 Pro-A, with 3rd-party RPC-1 firmware) in the system. Installing the drivers on the Windows side was a multiple pass process, as the packet writer initially refused to work with the DVD+RW media supplied with the drive (more on this below). Also a test burn I was making with Nero crashed the machine about halfway through, so I'm not overy enchanted with the quality of the Windows drivers. Nothing new there. On the Linux side, I passed hdc=ide-scsi and hdd=ide-scsi to the kernel to make both drives accessable from the SCSI subsystems, and started compiling the software at the DVD+RW for Linux page. I also tested a CD-RW burn with XCDRoast, which worked just fine, although the speed got locked at 4x, and I'm not entirely sure why (the drive itself should support 10x CD-RW burning).
Writing to the DVD+RW media under Linux has to pretty much be done exclusively with growisofs. There's a kernel patch available that is supposed to enable packet writing for the device, but I was unable to get it to work. The result is data that can be written to the disc and read pretty much on any DVD-ROM that can handle standard ISO9660 data and read the DVD+RW media at all (fortunately, most of them can). Unfortunately, writing this way reduces much of the functionality of the DVD+RW to that of a very fast DVD-RW -- you have to erase all the data to erase one file, though fortunately growisofs can trivially add data. Ideally, someone will write a working packet writing driver for Linux, fix the UDF driver (more on this below) and get those patches included in the 2.5 series. Until then, however, I'll just have to make do. Fortunately, the drive is so damn fast , that I don't mind writing things in large chunks.
Bolstered by my success writing under Linux, I went back to Windows to check on the readability. Windows was able to read the disc just fine, though due to the limitations of the Joliet CD extension, filenames were restricted to 64 characters if I wanted them to show up correctly in Windows (RockRidge fortunately has no such restriction, but Windows doesn't support it). To my delight, the InCD Packet Writing driver suddenly started working as well (I suspect it simply needed something to have been written to the disc once). I activated it, reformatted the DVD+RW disc as UDF, and tried dragging and dropping a few files onto it. Worked like a charm, and no speed drop as far as I could tell. So I booted back to Linux to see how well Linux could deal with it.
Well, the disc mounted. Files were retrievable. Unfortunately, the uid and gid of all the files was set to 4294967295. Remounting it with -o gid=1000,uid=1000 got relatively sane values, though it would have been nice to have the driver automatically set the ownership to either root or nobody by default. Unfortunately, the disc was still detected as write-protected by the kernel, so it was impossible to test writing to the disc. Still, I'm not entirely disappointed. I can write to it in chunks from Linux and have it read by either Linux or Windows, and drag-and-drop to it from Windows and have it read in either Windows or Linux, and that's good enough for my purposes.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I don't want to start a flame war (it was already started ;-), but if you want compatibility go for: DVD-R. why? simply lookup the media specs:
;-)
...), but if you want compatibility go for DVD-R.
refelctivity:
DVD-R: 45-85%
DVD-RW: 18-35%
DVD+RW: 18-35%
so basically the disc gets written to in the same format when you want to write DVDs playing in standalone players. (else they could not read it
so the refelctivity is the most important value here.
NOTE: cheap DVD-R media is at the lower end of the range and even lower, but quality media is at least %50 and up.
All DVD+RW recoreders have of course better specs (12x cd-r write,
NOTE: DVD+R would probably has the same quality as DVD-R but NONE of the current (cheap) writers support that.