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."

Comments

DVD standards...

[ZiZ]

I made the selection to go with DVD+RW recently; it seems to be the more stable of the standards based on my research. It certainly burns DVDs that are readable in all of my non-writer computer DVD drives; I don't have any current need for DVD player technology support.

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.)

JVC DVD+RW

[tenman]

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.

the dvd player/recorder matrix

[wildcard023]

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.

DVD+RW is not DVD

[nedron]

Note that discs produced by DVD+RW drives are not DVDs nor can they legally be called DVD. The only writeable formats which can produce output media that can be called DVD are DVD-R and DVD-RW. DVD-RAM is also available, but is primarily just for data storage.

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.

Re:DVD and D-VHS

[Ooblek]

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.

you get "creative"

[chainsaw1]

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)

DVD+RW is more DVD than DVD-RAM

[Namarrgon]

True, DVD+RW discs are not entitled to bear the DVD logo (though the drives may well be), as the logo is controlled by the DVD Forum.

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.