Combined DVD Burners Coming Soon

MonMotha writes "Sony recently announced plans to make a DVD burner capable of supporting both the - (DVD-R and DVD-RW) as well as the + (DVD+RW and DVD+R) standards for burnable DVD media. This move could spur the adoption of DVD burners, which have been poor sellers so far, partly due to the lack of a single standard for writable and rewritable media. The drive will not support the older DVD-RAM due to it's plastic casing."

Comments

The real use for DVD/R

[smallstepforman]

Its suprising to see that some people fail to see the larger picture which DVD-R brings. Walk into any Blockbuster/VideoEzy/Video library, rent a movie overnight, stick it into your PC and start ripping and recompressing, and burn the movie onto your DVD-R. Total cost for movie ownership - $5 for rental and $5 for blank DVD-R. This will get cheaper, since blank media prices will fall. Most video libraries also offer a rent 5 movies for $10 deal, so you can get 5 movies for $35, or $7 each at current prices. Of course, you have to factor in burner and PC ammortisation and electricity, but you get the general idea. When blank disks cost $2 each, you're looking at $4 for pirated movie disks. Great value in any book, when you take into consideration that most movies cost $20 or so. You miss out on the menus and extra features, but you can always burn them onto another disk. The best thing is that you dont get to see the FBI style warnings before every disk (telling you how wrong it is to do what you've just done).

The best part about this situation is that free software already exists which can rip a DVD and compress it to fit on a 4.38Gb (4.7G) disk at the push of a button. Just hit start, flip disks 2 hours later, and hit burn. If you have a second DVD-ROM, you dont even have to hit burn - insert the two disks (original and blank), and just hit Start.

Of course, the MPAA will catch onto this soon, but its too late to introduce new counter measures. The cat is out of the bag.

Re:ahh, cost

[Zeinfeld]

I just looked at dirtcheapdrives and they are quoting $450 for the low end DVD-RW drives and $700 for the higher end ones. Media is $125 for 20 disks.

In comparison I have seen CD-RW drives for $80 and media for under $1 a disk. The price differential is simply not justified by a mere ten-fold increase in capacity. It is pretty obvious that the price of the drives will be slashed to reasonable levels before they catch on on a scale large enough to make the media affordable.

The big problem is that there is absolutely no backup media on the market that is as cost effective as an IDE hard disk drive! An IDE drive with a capacity of 120Gb can be bought for just over $1 per GB and requires only a $20 caddy to make it into a removable medium. If they would make them hot swappable there would be no reason to use anything else. They are faster than and have a higher capacity than tape drive systems costing tens of thousands. Best of all even if a drive fails entirely you have a chance at recovery - try that with a mag tape that has been chewed in a faulty drive.

I tried to explain this idea to the Iomega investors some time ago when they were convinced that everyone would be queuing up to buy Jaz and the clik! disk would be taking over the world. DVD-RW still suffers from the same sort of economics as the Jaz drive - media too expensive to use as a backup, drive system too expensive.