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The Ulltimate DVD Burner?
prostoalex writes "The DRU500A by Sony burns DVD-R/-RW, DVD+RW/+R, and even CD-R/CD-RW discs. The price sticker is relatively high, but for those worried about the compatibility issues of DVD burners this one looks like a solution." FYI: I recently ran a poll on this very topic.
you can piss of both the MPAA and RIAA at the same time. Simply beautiful!
If not, I'll stick to my Pioneer drive, thank-you-very-much.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
THAT's what I really want. If they manage to innovate the rest of the alphabet in there too, hot damn.
aside: the acronym situation is totally out of control. It's an RIAA ploy. When we can't tell what we're buying anymore, suddenly the piracy will stop...
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Yet it is one hundred dollars cheaper than the very first 4-speed CDR burner I bought.
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"Those who quote others are more likely to one day be quoted" -Tom Planter
However, don't expect it (or the available software) to be either as simple or as nice as the iDVD interface and layout.
(One thing the Macintosh people have down pat is interface. My GOD! it's easy!)
Linux comaptibility is most likely trivial, though, on the upside. Just treat it as a CDRW that has a 4.7 GiB capacity and write to it in UDF packets instead of a Rock Ridge or Joliet stream, it should work.
Don't expect any firmware cracks for this beast either. Sony hardware is pretty hard to crack (Techtronics, probably the best site for getting modded DVD players, has to go and do chip replacement and other nasty-level cracks on standalones.) Besides that, I would presume (since Sony is one of the core members of DVD Forum) that this will automagically region code any video-format DVDs' you create, unless such coding is already required in the writable DVD specifications.
It sucks that for DVD's there won't be a company that can readily capitalize on the market and the product like MP3.com did with music.. then again, music is easier to forge than movies are...
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
At $349, you'd be wasting your money. I paid only $249 for a Sunbeam Gas Grill. At 40,000 BTU/hour, it will easily burn DVD-R/-RW/+RW/+R/ROMs, CD-R/CD-RW/CD-ROMs, floppies, Zip disks, Jaz disks, books, magazines, motherboards, DVD/CD drives, keyboards, hotdogs, steaks, dead rodents, old shoes ... just about anything.
And if you get tired of all the burning, you can choose to turn it down a bit and go with golden brown.
$349 is not terribly expensive by DVD recorder standards. But having recently bought a recorder, one thing I'd really caution folks about is buying one to create video dvd's without really researching it. Most software that comes with burners is complete crap. MyDVD, which came with my Pioneer and is also bundled with the Sony, is a good example of this. It is incredibly limited in terms of adding basic functionality like chapters or even customized menu design. So if you don't want to create something that looks like 'Bobby's first DVD', you are quickly looking at software packages that cost more than the recorder itself (and they still don't have a lot of the functionality you'd expect at that price). Add to that the fact that you need heinous amounts of hard drive space and CPU to work on this stuff, the total price tag quickly jumps way beyond the initial investment.
Forgot about that one, didn't they?
My, how quickly they forget.
And if it DID burn DVD-RAM, I'd ask whether it can handle both Type 1 and Type 2 DVD-RAM. (Don't ask...)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
However, DVD and CD speeds are not directly comparable. According to this page, 1x in DVD terms is 11.08 Mb/s, while 1x in CD terms is a well-known (150 KB/s = 1.2 Mb/s).
Assuming max burn speed, burn times for a full 4.7 GB DVD disc would translate as follows:
11.08 Mb/s = 1.385 MB/s
4,700 MB / 1.385 = 3393 seconds = 56.5 minutes @ 1x
This gives us ~28 minutes to burn a full DVD-RW @ 2x, ~23 minutes for a DVD+R/+RW @ 2.4x, or ~15 minutes for a DVD-R @ 4x
Translating the DVD speed ratings above into CD terms, we get the following CD-equivalent write speeds for the drive:
22x DVD+R/+RW, 36x DVD-R, 18x DVD-RW, 73x DVD-ROM Read.
Take these numbers with a grain of salt though. After calculating the above, I found this page which says 1x DVD = 1250 KB/s (= 10Mb/s using drive manufacturers' definition of 1MB = 1000KB). Whatever. Close enough.