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Sony DRU-500A Review
An anonymous reader writes "Just found a nice review of the Sony DRU-500A" This looks
to be damn solid DVD burner. It's amazing how much prices on these things have
come down. It might be time for me to make my epic film starring CowboyNeal, Samzenpus and Hemos in a moving story about Love, Friendship, and Growing Up in the Face of Adversity. I probably should write a script or something before I start filming. Or not.
Isn't Sony one of the big content producers that has their knickers in a knot over piracy? I wonder what kind of content protection features this drive might have that Sony isn't anxious to advertise.
I agree with you statement that DVD burner's will be olbsolete in a couple of years but disagree that DVD burner's will never catch on. This is because most people (especially computer geeks) only expect their hardware to last a few years.
DVD burner's will be used extensivly for the next few years when the will be replaced by something better. Just like CD's are now being replaced by DVD's
Technology is most abused by the very people it was created to help
A certain Andre H. (who, at times, is the official Linux IDE maintainer) told recently not to use Sony drives because they have certain firmware "properties" which make them unsuitable to copy copy-protected material. It may seem funny or irrelevant to you, but this means they play dirty tricks with your data.
how often do you really need to burn like 8 cds for one project anyway?
How about monthly full backups of a large storage device? Daily incremental backups (everything changed since yesterday) and weekly differential backups (everything changed since the last full backup) only go so far. Eight CDs don't even total six gigabytes.
How about storage of digital video? It's big, and too-heavy compression will destroy its suitability for use in further editing.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Unfortunately, the writable DVD formats can only utilize a single layer.
See here and here
> how often do you really need to burn like 8 cds for one project anyway?
:-) Many /. users have multiple 80-120GB hard drives, RAID arrays, etc.--and that's on our *home* computers, not just at the office...
Look at the audience you're speaking to.
And I tell you, once you start downloading SVCDs and MP3s and games (God Bless USENET!), that hard drive space goes quickly. Sure, you could have 500 CD-Rs lying around--but that's inconvenient as hell. Better would be to have it on 60 DVDs, and even better would be to have it on hard drive arrays *backed up* to DVDs.
Not to mention home video recordings--what better way to store them long-term than on high-quality DVDs? Even DV tape is capable of degrading over time, especially with repeated viewings, because it's a tape-based format--whereas the optical DVD format is both more durable (esp. if you make multiple back-ups) and will definitely be long-lasting in terms of format readability since it has been adopted by the movie industry. I have wedding and birth film on DV just waiting for me to be able to afford a DVD-R/W recorder so I can transfer it to DVD and make copies to distribute to friends and family.
Let's face it--the time has come for the recordable DVD to go mainstream. Even set-top DVD recorders are available at Best Buy and Circuit City in the $800 range now, whereas they were $2000 and hard to find last year. In a couple more years they'll be replacing the VCR in most middle-income households, and only the low-income will still be using VCRs instead of DVDRs.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
> A DVD set top recorder is going to need to encode in real time,
> which means a fairly simple codec.
They all use MPEG-2 right now, because that's what a DVD is--an MPEG-2 encoded in a special format. I think some standalone DVD recorders can do MPEG-1, but I don't think anyone cares--that isn't standard and won't play back on most normal DVD players.
> This means no DIVX or XVID
There are already commercial MPEG-4 encoding chips available. They're trivial since everything is done in hardware--it's very simple to make an ASIC or similar that can do something with no effort than would strain a general-purpose CPU. They're just too expensive right now for consumer-level applications--exactly like items with hardware MPEG-2 encoders were a couple of years back.
> standard T120 VCR tapes can record a full 6 hours and they're
> dirt cheap and reusable.
The reason they're called T-120 tapes is because they last 120 minutes at the best quality; as you know they only last 6 hours if you use a mode like SLP/EP and don't mind having a *very* poor picture with black lines here and there every few frames. Only very cheap or very poor people, or people with bad eyesight, or people who intend to just time-shift and not keep the recorded program, use longer-play modes. I can't even do that for time-shifting programs, the picture's so bad.
Aside from which, that's what DVD-RW is for. Reusable. Perfect for time-shifting, while DVD-R is perfect for archiving. And you may not fit 6 hours of low-quality craptastic video on one without invovking a nonstandard (for DVD) MPEG-1 stream, but so what--just buy three, since they'll be cheaper than even the cheapest VHS tapes within the next 2 years. DVD-R and DVD-RW discs are destined to follow the same path CD-R and CD-RW discs did when they were a relative novelty in the consumer space--they started out expensive, they're getting cheaper, and in a few years they'll be available for pennies each. Today you can find excellent-quality Taiyo Yuden-made CD-Rs on sale at Best Buy for $5 per 50 after a main-in rebate, or $20 before the rebate--that is where DVD-Rs will be in five years.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus