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DVD Recording - Is There a Winner Yet?
Rob writes "Ok, so I've finally gotten my TiVo configured to let me extract and archive video, now I'm wondering what is my best solution? I currently have a CDR that I've been able to use to save both VCD and SVCD. Unfortunately I have a very old DVD player that will only play VCD's. So I decided that it's time to look at recording to DVD, but what is the right answer? Has any format won? I just got back from Fry's and I could get either -R/-RW or +R/+RW and there were even drives that did all of the formats. This is all well and good, since I'll have to buy a new DVD player to play any of them, but which format is most widely accepted? Even if I get a drive that will record in any format what do most DVD players accept? Sure I can make sure that my DVD player will play whatever format I produce but what about my parents and friends?"
I know you want to go out and get that dvd burner now , but if you can get by with your (s)vcds for another year or so the blue laser dvd burners which store a little over 24 gigabytes will probably be about the same price as the current dvd burners. However, if you can't wait (and I don't blame you I want one too), I would by one of the Sony burners that supports all of the formats, they cost a little more though. After you get it installed and have a new dvd player you can try recording in different formats to see what your or friends or families dvd players like best and burn your dvds accordingly.
If your existing player works be happy, but if you are not willing to buy a new compatible player, forget about it, return the DVD burner and stick with VCD & SVCD.
Its very hit and miss for all DVD+R DVD-R DVD-RW & DVD+RW. I've found two occasions where two instances of nominally the same model player ( JVC, Sharp) DVD-R played perfectly on one and glitched badly on the other.
The "format war" is a distraction to cover the fact that the DVD industry sold out to Hollywood and changed the laser wavelength for burned disks and this makes compatability of "old" players designed to the DVD Forum's specs a crap
shoot when it comes to playing burned disks.
Before adopting WHATWG, read the moonlight.NET EULA [http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx]
here's what you do
1. ditch the dvd idea
2. buy a relatively cheap pc, or if you're crafty, convert an xbox.
3. put a big harddrive in it
4. connect svideo out of computer into video 1 on tv or equivalent.
5. visit doom9.org. and buy dixv pro codec
6. convert tivo format to divx.
7. you're done
Got CDs with mpg files burned as just files instead of (X)S/VCD tracks? It'll play em. MP3s burned on a DVD? It'll play em. Got mpg files encoded with nonstandard resolutions? (512x384, 352x176, etc) It'll play em. I can personally sttest to it's smooth playback of both PAL DVD and SVCD content on NTSC hardware
With several revisions floating around, region coding can be disabled on all models, just requiring a different code to be punched in depending on which model you have. Easily looked up based on the serial number of the unit.
Early, 'golden' models were just using an IDE DVD drive, which some industrious users have managed to hack the firmware for to allow dropping in a HD instead. Macrovision can only be disabled on these early 'golden' models as well, which are sadly hard to find nowadays. Granted, the playback hardware was less powerful in the 'golden' models than the other variants to pop up since, but I'd still like to be able to just pop in a big HD worht of MP3s & JPGs, load up the undocumented 'musical slideshow' feature, and just leave it running :'>
In order to make this past Christmas a successful one, I wanted to make sure that the "special edition" DVDs I was making for family members were as compatible as possible.
After extensive reading, some experimenting and some real-life experience (both successful and less-than) I can say the following:
A DVD-R burned on high quality media (e.g. 2X Maxell - this brand has the best compatibility that I have read about and personally experienced) in the proper DVD spec (I stick with 1.0 or 1.1) will work on MOST players, including at least one "first generation" Pioneer set-top player.
In my experience, after testing various conditions on a number of set-top players, it is the media that makes the most difference in compatibility rather than anything else. As long as your MPEG video stream is spec (or corrected) and your audio is also at spec I think you'll be good to go.
BTW I do all this via BSD (Mac OS X) and Linux (TiVo) over a WLAN.
They just want their movies to work on Uncle Bob's DVD player, puchased 3 years ago... it ain't gonna work with DVD+RW.
This just plain isn't true. If you browse through sites like dvdrhelp.com, which I did recently, you will find two things: 1) the user reports of compatability vary considerably even within the same DVD player model, and 2) if you average the results (which you must do because there is so much "noise" in them), there is very little difference between the two formats in terms of compatability. If one is better than the other, it is by only a few percentage points at most.
I have played +R disks in many players made during the last 5 years, and have not had any problems. The surface reflectivities of the two types of disk are very similar, and a player which is physically capable of playing a -R will almost always play a +R, at least in my experience. Some players might refuse to play a disk which is tagged as a +R, but there are utilities available which will let you change the so-called "book type" field to get around this problem.
I agree that end users will not have any issue with the two types of DVD-R/RW, but there is one difference that probably will make a difference to some consumers. DVD+R/RW is capable of recording with lossless linking in the mode which is the most compatable with video DVD players (see this page (near the bottom) for a technical description of this issue). What this feature means is that with +R/RW, you can stream variable bitrate MPEG directly to the DVD and have the resulting disk be more compatable with video DVD players than with -R/RW, which wasn't designed with this in mind. My hunch is that this is one of the reasons M$ has decided to put its weight behind +R/RW (along with the Mt. Rainier stuff).
The bottom line is that for all users who don't need to stream MPEG directly to the DVD (which probably includes most Linux users), there is very little practical difference between the formats. Both formats have the support of some heavy hitters and neither one is likely to go away anytime soon.