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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."
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.
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
From your "FAQ," it appears that you have some kind of bias against the DVD+RW Alliance, who it should be noted, consists of Dell, Hewlett-Packard Company, MCC/Verbatim, Philips Electronics, Ricoh Company Ltd., Sony Corporation, Thomson multimedia and Yamaha Corporation. It's not some cobbled together group of fly-by-night companies.
Furthermore, I believe you are factually incorrect in stating that DVD+RW can't "legally" be called DVD. The DVD+RW Alliance seem to do so with impunity on their site. What is true is that their format is not licensed by the "DVD Forum" nor can it use their logo. But, big deal. The Alliance has its own logo which is just as pretty, and it seems to me that they are a fairly reliable manufacturing bunch. And who's the DVD Forum, anyway? Just another, larger group of companies. Interestingly, it would appear that all the members of the DVD+RW Alliance are also members of the DVD Forum, although not vice-versa, of course. Anyway, these two formats will duke it out on their respective merits and the marketing savvy of their proponents, and not on whether some licensing agency nobody cares about issues a logo. (I mean, DVD-RAM, how the hell does that get to be called DVD-anything? It's not even the same recording material as a regular DVD. I'll be nice and not discuss the "RAM" portion of the name. Let's just say Panasonic's been trying to mainstream this product line for many years and I wish them the best of luck.)
And as for confusion, how confused can people be? If slashdotters can wrap their heads around SIMM, DIMM, SODIMM, SDRAM, RDRAM, HTML, XML, XHTML, MathML, XSL, and so on, what's so hard about researching a couple of recordable DVD formats?
Of course, it's all a moot issue. Recordable blue-laser discs will be out in a couple of years and by that time, these two formats will have caught on about as much as the Sony HiFD and Imation LS120 did.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.