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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.
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>
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.
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"?
You know, you have this obsession with the DVD Forum that I find most unhealthy, and somehow, you keep getting modded up for it.
For DVD video, DVD+RW has pretty much exactly the same success rate as DVD-RW at being read in standard DVD players, and it handles data much better to boot. (Did you actually read the review, or did you just come here to troll the DVD+RW standards folks?) If it can be played in as many DVD players as DVD-RW, have data read by most DVD-ROMs, read DVD discs, read DVD-R discs, even read DVD-RW discs, it can bloody well put "DVD" as part of its name.
- 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.....