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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."
i was just recently in the market for these, and they REALLY have to get a standard together.
i'm currently looking at DVD+RW... i guess DVDR and DVD+R are also both good.
i'm just going to wait, becuase i don't want to be stuck with a drive 6 months from now that no one makes media for anymore.
to the standards people:
* 5+ gigs per disk
* plays on ANY DVD player
* readily available cheap media
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
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
I remember reading a good 15-20 years ago in my Highlights magazine (good tech info) that the scientists were working on a holographic storage device. Instead of storing things in 2d, they store things in 3d, thus drastically increasing the storage available. They supposedly would be able to store terabites of information in a re-recordable media. Don't tell me my Highlights magazine was wrong!
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.
D-VHS may be superior, but it's still a magnetic tape format, like VHS is, correct? One of the things that I like about DVD is that no matter how many times I play a movie, it will never wear out. I'm sure we've all expirenced haveing an audio or video tape lose quality from overplaying. CDs and DVDs don't have this problem, so why would I want one? The DVD format could just be amended, like audio CDs/computer CD hybrids (CD-XA?) were ammended to the origional audio CD format. Plus if this is indeed a tape format, then you don't get that great near instant seek of DVDs. Is there anything to prevent these tapes from degrading?
DVD-R media costs less than DVD-RW, has an archival life of up to 100 years
But how will you read the data from it in 100 years? We don't even know if we will be able to purchase compatible readers in 2-3 years.
Why is it that everyone thinks that the only legitimate use of DVD-R in relation to DVD is for piracy?
For god's sake, all I want to do is backup my DVD's so that my I don't have to buy it again after my kid scratches it up.
To be practical, though, we need higher storage capacity. Most of my movies won't fit onto 4.7GB.
<sarcasm>I just love the DMCA. Makes it illegal to do with DVD what I've done for years with VHS videos I legally own.</sarcasm>
I have one of the new flat-panel iMacs, which to my knowledge, includes the reviewed Pioneer drive.
I can corroborate, for CD-RW, that the write speeds are a bit pokey. It took about 25 minutes, round-trip, for me to burn a CD-RW full of MP3's.
However, I think this is balanced by the fact that:
a) Burning on Mac OS X is dead simple. Insert media. Choose format type. Drag files to burn to recordable media icon which appears on desktop. Burn. Soooo much more simple than any program I'd ever used on Windows.
b) Compatability. The reviewer is correct in placing much emphasis on how compatible DVD-RW is with current players. No matter how good YOU may be at making things work, buying the right player, etc., the family is still going to think "that's stupid" when they take the movie you burned on DVD+RW, stick it in THEIR player, and see an error message.
IMHO, YMMV, etc, etc.
From the article:
Ignoring for a moment the moral and legal implications of stealing content, this is all a huge PITA, and would in all seriousness probably take several hours for a typical movie. Is it really worth it? A practical example: I just picked up "Jay And Silent Bob Strikes Back" (sure, it's no "Clerks" or "Dogma" but I'm a fan of Smith's work). It has two DVDs crammed full of stuff. While I haven't checked, they pretty much have to be dual layer, because otherwise, why not just issue one dual-layer disc?
So there's four recordable DVDs worth of content, and a ton of time spent recreating menus and splitting content out over four discs, not to mention the cost of the four recordable discs themselves. When you're done, you have to switch between four discs instead of two, and you navigate them using crappy homemade menu screens instead of the cool ones on the original discs. Know how much this movie cost me? $17.99.
For the love of God, people, just go buy the damn movie.
Couldn't have said it better myself. If only Hollywood would rely on producing GOOD flicks, adding a little extra "value" (read: nice side features) to the DVD release, and releasing them for a FAIR price, which will make me *want* to buy the damn thing instead of increasing the incentive to just get a DivX copy without paying for it. The latter might be Wrong(TM) in my opinion, but I'm damned tempted sometimes. $30 for the Trainspotting DVD (my local Media Play) and it's just a dump of the VHS onto DVD with chapter selection slapped onto it. What a joke.
The Free desktop that Just Works
Finally, we can have our favorite shows on DVD. If MTV Home Video doesn't want to release Daria on DVD, I can simply capture it off my DSS with a PC capture card, edit out the commercials, convert it to MPEG2 and author my own discs. It's work, but it's nothing _too_ hard. And technically, it's fair use.
Of course, I'd rather plunk down $120 to have MTV do all that work for me. Earth to movie companies: if you release it (at good quality and affordable prices), we WILL buy it. Stop trying to deny me the ABILITY to pirate video, and try denying me the MOTIVATION.
I own about 400 DVDs at this point, and buy 20 or more per month. TV series top my wish lists: Sopranos, Hogan's Heroes, Batman Animated, Batman Beyond, Twin Peaks, Simpsons, Futurama, The Young Ones, Daria, Farscape, and lots of others. I'd buy every one if you put them out.
I've built up so much character I have an alter-ego
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"?
the FIRST night it is shown on the very first playing I know someone that will have an AWESOME copy of it on DV. he has a translucent screen setup with the audio directly patched from the projecter's audio system. The projected image is sent through a beam-splitter and then throught another lens system.
Here's the kicker... He wont let anyone have a copy and you have to be at his home to view it.
Yes it's not 6.1 THX yaddayadda... but sitting in his living room drinking beer and eating pizza-rolls is a better way to watch the newest flicks.
Oh, Dont try this at home....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
From the press release:
I always wondered what happened to this technology. Looks like it might finally arrive :-)
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
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"?
- All those wonderful PowerMac/iMac machines that are being pumped out have the Pioneer drive in them. Even if the DVD+ format wins out, there will still be quite a few people making disks down the road. With Apple behind them, though, I thought it a safe bet it would have a pretty large margin share. (Before you go "Apple only has single-digit % market share", I am aware, but alot of people I know think "If it is on a Mac for AV, it must be pretty good).
- Compatibility was a huge issue for me. I have quite a few family members with DVD players that I don't know about. With DVD-R, I am almost always guaranteed that the disc will work on their player. That way, I can send a disc out without worrying about it not working.
- To be honest, I have been tracking the DVD+ standards group, and their inability to come to an agreement on the +R standard until very recently had me kind of upset. To top that off, companies promising DVD+R upgrades (HP included) have quietly removed this notice from their websites and their products. One of the forums I visited even had an anonymous report that a tech said they will not upgrade the units. Don't have time to wait for you guys to pull your thumbs out of your butts, guys....
- Finally, my biggest motivation: price. Best Buy had one on the shelf for $300 with an additional 10% off at the register. Couldn't pass that up.
Sure, there are drawbacks. As the article mentioned, write times are slow. If I am burning a DVD-RW to test on my x-box, I might as well go and get dinner with friends. The unit is also a little slow on the read, but nothing a second DVD-ROM drive didn't fix. The other thing that might deter some folks is that the software is way under-developed. I wish Adobe would just build DVD creation support into Premiere so I would have a nice all in one solution for my digital camcorder, but I can dream.In all, I am glad at my purchase. As I mentioned above, compatiblity has be fantastic, and I have something that I can play digitally for quite some time.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
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.