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Time to Purchase a DVD-R?
Evanrude asks: "With DVD writers having significantly come down in price over the past year more companies are coming out with their version of the DVD-R. My company has a large file archive of documents and data that don't necessarily need to be stored on read/write media, but need to be kept online. I want to accomplish this with online DVD storage but is this the right way to go? Who has the best value with the most features of all the DVD-R's on the market? What are some things to look for and things to avoid when purchasing a DVD-R? Is it even time to purchase one, or should I wait another six months?"
You should really be looking at hard drives. $100 for 120GB isn't uncommon, and it works out to be a lot more efficient than a bunch of DVD readers/writers/media in the end.
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Chris Lambert
I would say to most people to wait, the standards haven't been entirely ironed out. But it seems that if you need large amounts of online storage and don't really need to worry about compatibility, I'd say go for it.
If it needs to be kept online, it'll probably be cheaper and certainly faster to just buy a couple of 100gb harddrives.
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I've been told the only decent DVD-R drive out there is the Pioneer DVR-A04. One decent drive doesn't inspire me to go out and buy a DVD-R drive just yet. Anybody else know of a better DVD burner?
When I saw the title I thought this would be about whether or not to get a DVD-R now before companies standardize on Digital Rights Technology that could effectively cripple the device in the future. In fact, that would be the only reason that I would consider getting a DVD-R (or +R or +RW or whatever other format and crazy acronym they come up with).
Who said Freedom was Fair?
What I want to know, is why are Apple branded DVD-Rs the cheapest? $5 each compared to $7.50 and up for others. Is there something wrong with them, or did hell freeze over? Before you flame, I love Apple, I own a Mac, and I know that high quality, well thought out, and featurefull products come out of Apple. But let's all be honest, Apple is not known as a price beater! What gives?
A couple of years ago, Apple started offering it as an option. At exactly the same time, a number of PC vendors did. One of my colleagues at work ordered a new PC and it just "came with" DVD-RAM. So, I figured it was going to be standard and I ordered it on my own Mac.
The media started out being very expensive--$40 for 2.6 gig. Now the price of the media is reasonable, but the format is all but orphaned.
I'm using DVD-RAM as my backup medium, but I have to wonder whether any future machine I buy will actually be able to read the things.
So, I jumped in too soon and I'm sorry.
Is it time for DVD-R, or DVD+R? Don't ask me. I thought it was time for DVD-RAM and I was wrong.
Oh, well, at least I bought a ZIP drive when a colleague was buying some kind of magneto-optical 135-megabyte device that was faster/cheaper/better/orphaned...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Huh? Just buy twice the # of hard drives & use them for backup. Since they're only being used for backup and otherwise just sitting there (spin them down when idle), their lifetime is more or less infinite. Also, backup then happens in a fraction of the time of tape or DVD.
Backup with tape made sense when a tape cartridge was larger than a typical hard drive, and also cheaper than a typical hard drive, not to mention that hard drives used to be extremely expensive as compared to the present day.
If you want portability, there are quite a few ways to drag a hard drive around and hot swap it wherever you might need it.
And "real" offline storage? WTF do you mean by that? I've seen far more tapes die than HD's. I still have two hard drives over 15 years old and they still work. The typical life of magnetic tape is 10 years. I've had plenty of CDs die too.
Maybe you mean punchcards? Those suckers last forever so long as the overhead plumbing holds up! Maybe I should hook the old card reader back up? I'm sure I saw it around here somewhere just the other day...
Why? Because film is progressive, not interlaced. When they convert the film to NTSC video (using equipment/process called telecine), they have to convert it to interlaced format, using a process called 3:2 pulldown. This splits each frame into two interlaced fields, which raises the effective rate from 24 Hz to 48 Hz. Then they duplicate some of the fields, to get from 48 Hz to the video rate of 60 Hz. Actually the NTSC rate is 59.94 Hz, but usually they ignore that detail, and the running time of the resulting video is off by 0.1%.
This results in a big difference compared to the output of video cameras. With a video camera, the two interlaced fields that make up a frame are not captured simultaneously. Instead, the camera captures a separate field every 1/60 of a second. Thus if the camera or the scene is moving, you will not be able to merge two consecutive fields into a single coherent frame. When the video is played back at normal speed, this is not a problem; in fact, it makes the video "smoother". However, if you try to display a still frame, you will see the image oscillate between the two time-independent fields at 30 Hz, which is incredibly annoying.
With telecine output, however, consecutive fields come from the same film frame. And the MPEG-2 video stream takes advantage of this by avoiding encoding the duplicate fields that were inserted by the 3:2 pulldown. So the DVD actually contains 48 fields per second, with flags that tell the player which fields to duplicate for the pulldown. A progressive-scan DVD player simply uses those flags to reconstruct the original non-interlaced frames.
For DVDs from a video source, a progressive player does have to do some "magic" in order to get reasonable deinterlaced output. This is not an exact science; different players use various techniques to do this, so the resulting quality can vary quite a bit.
Note that for PAL and SECAM video, the field rate is 50 Hz, so 3:2 pulldown is not used. But it is still possible for the DVD player to do perfect deinterlace of DVDs mastered from film.
Some are quite inexpensive.The travel agency I work for archives all our customer service phone calls onto DVD-R and has been doing so for quite awhile now. Then, if a customer asks to speak to a manager or files a complaint, a manager can review the entire phone call to see what was in fact said to the customer and what the customer said. The phone call can even be played back to the customer over the phone. Easy way to know who's telling the truth!