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The Most Compatible DVD Format: DVD-R
jbridges writes "CDR-Info tested eight types of media (two examples of each media type) using five different recorders, then tested compatibility in twenty-seven standalone DVD players and twenty DVD-ROM drives.
They determined that DVD-R is clearly the most compatible DVD recording format on the market. To assess the compatibility level of DVD Formats they created video content on a DVD writer using DVD-R/RW and +R/RW media. These discs were then played back in other DVD players and DVD-ROM drives -over a 1,000 combinations of drive, media and player were tested."
beta
I carve all of my information into stone tablets unearthed not near here.
To date, I have yet to find a computer that these tablets are incompatible with.
Of course, the only thing I *do* with these computers is smash them to bits with my stone tablets when their owners owe my boss money, but you know how it is.
I would really hate to buy now, and in a while be the guy with that "weird" DVD that lost the market war so long ago.
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Last time I checked, Pioneer, one of the companies backing -R/RW, started adding support for DVD +R/RW on their recorders. Also, -R/RW seems to be the cheaper media wherever I check. Sadly to say, but it seems the -R/RW may be on its way out the door.
who likes to say "dvd plus arr"?? "dvd arr" works much better! and if you say "dvd dash arr", do you also say "cd dash arr" and "cd dash arr double you"? then again no "cd plus arr" exists...
As we decided that Sony is good this week, it's nice to see that according to the review, the Sony DVD players play almost all discs well, better than any other manufacturer.
Unfortunately, that's not the creator of the player I just bought...
Given that DVDRW drives are $160 or less, DVDrom drives are $80 or less, DVD players (for the TV) are $100 or less, what does it really matter? All new ones are compatible with anything, so if yours happens not to work go out and buy one that can.
The only problem with that is laptops, but slimline DVD-CDRW combo drives to retrofit to laptops are now under $200 (last time I checked, which was several months ago) and I can't immagine that a DVDRW is that much more.
Even if your drive doesn't work and you don't want to throw it away, it's possible a firmware upgrade will let it read all -R and +R media - worked for my NEC laptop. In fact it seems that some -R[W] and +R[W] writers might be upgradable to multiformat, like the Pioneer DVR 105 (identical hardware to the 106) just as soon as the hackers finish working out what needs changing in the hex image.
Beep beep.
I'm tired of writing the same replies to people who say "I'll wait until they're cheaper and a single format wins." So here, I'll just link-whore myself to my own earlier posts -
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http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=71465&cid=646
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=70097&cid=637
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
...but the Sony DRU-500AX burns 4x DVD-R/-RW, DVD+RW/+R... clearly, this is the most compatible burner! :)
"The bad: No Mac support." Opps, nevermind.
According to this chart, DVD-RW also seems more compatible than DVD+RW...
If you ask me, the obvious reason DVD-R got more momentum despite "DVD+R" being the theoretically better format on paper, is because right when DVD-RW drives dropped below $400 (i.e. when I purchased my Pioneer DVR-104) is because there was no such thing as DVD+R yet, just DVD+RW.
DVD+RW media is (was? I don't even know since I don't buy it) expensive and significantly less comptable than DVD-R, so anyone looking to write something that could actually play in their set top dvd player pretty much needed DVD-R. I think the DVR-106's inclusion of +R and +RW is just a matter of making it look more competitive on paper. Thus I end this with a question... for anyone who owns a drive that supports both -r and +r, how frequently do you use one kind of media over another? I wouldn't be surprised if most people that own a -r/+r drive rarely use +r.
Coincidentally, the Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro has an article in today's web edition at
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A
discussing his recent experiences testing a few consumer DVD recorders. He notes that the current contenders in the non-PC market are DVD-RAM/-R and DVD+RW/+R, while DVD-RW is outside contention "thanks to still-insane prices". He notes that even though DVD-RAM has better features, "The most important factor, however, is compatibility, and here DVD+RW beats DVD-RAM soundly".
So are we going to end up with consumers buying +RW/+R standalone recorders, while computer users line up behind -RW/-R based on comparisons like CDR-Info's? I really thought this coming christmas would bring DVD recording to the masses, but with this standards war continuing, I'm not so sure anymore
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
The way it's looked to me the last few months of looking at these things, +R looks like it has the momentum to end up being the defacto standard. I probably wouldn't care so much, but I've been using Apples for the last six months, and OS X refuses to recognize the format, you have to use third party tools like Toast to make the things operable, and of course there's no way to enable iDVD to work with anything other than the burners Apple sells.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Ummm, not all of have been mastering DVDs since 1999. I've posed this question in comments several times on Slashdot and have gotten a variety of answers.
;)
+R/RW proponents seem to think that +RW is more compatible than -R/-RW, and that it will be the standard that wins. OTOH, CDRINFO seems to be saying that *both* formats seem to have wide backing in the industry, and that the -R and -RW formats are more compatible than their + counterparts. The media for both are widely available cheaply, but -R/-RW being slightly cheaper than +R/RW
The article also points out that there seems to be a group of +R/+RW fanboys out there. Whether these guys are really zealots, or it's just astroturfing from Phillips, one can only guess.
CDRinfo has been fair and objective, and their methods seem fairly scientific. I applaud them, and say "It's about frickin' time!"
My journal has hot
I , however , am a poor poor college student. I can not spare 200 Euros as easily as most people. Plus, i don't REALLY need stuff like that (even though i REALLY want it).
And the 2 year limit is relevant. I mean, my main box that i am writing right now is brand new, only 2 years old. and my other box is a 486 which , acting as an X-terminal , is perfectly ok. So, to me 2 years is nothing. To others 2 years i a life time.
(Well 2 years is a lot to me too but i pretend i don't mind
Not to mention that i will have invested time and money in the media (the disks) that in a worst case scenario will be totaly useless once my device breaks and i can neither find support nor buy a new device.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
how cold they justify not including this oh so important format!!!!
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
One important point I didn't see in the article was that many old dvd players will only play disks that have a "book type field" of DVD-ROM.
See this link.
My old Toshiba SD2100 is that way. So it wouldn't play DVD+R disks that I made on my Memorex 4X DVD+RW burner (actually a rebranded NEC) until I reflashed the NEC firmware with HP firmware (written for HP by NEC). The HP firmware causes DVD+R disks to be written with a DVD-ROM bitsetting (for maximum compatibility). Those DVD+RW drives that default to a DVD+R bitsetting cause problems with old home DVD players. For what it's worth, I bought a DVD+RW only because that's what I have to use at work and I wanted to avoid compatibility issues.
Ed.
Considering DVD+R/+RW touts itself as being "the most compatible format." This is mentioned all over their website, especially in the FAQ. They claim a 95% compatibility rate with all DVD players and drives. Who wants to be the bad guy and tell them they're wrong?
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
;-)
I don't consider the DVD+ companies to have done that well marketing. The first DVD+ drives were RW only, but promised to be able to do R with a firmware upgrade (-this being insane in it's own right. I've burned hundreds of R discs and maybe one or two expensive RW ones which are less compatible for both DVD- and DVD+. Talk about bad design goals). This proved not to be true and a lot of people getting into DVD burning with DVD+ found out they would need new drives. So the DVD+ companies really shot themselves in the foot and generated bad press on that one.
I think all the DVD+ zealots have a lot to do with people rationalizing something they bought without looking into the two formats. -R has always been the most compatible and the cheapest, but if you buy a +R without looking you're going to try to justify your purchase with all the stupid things we hear being said. "Our format is designed to be compatible, while your's isn't." Sure, mine is designed not to be compatible. Geez.
Sheesh. You people are so frickin' lazy...
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
First point - All DVDs contain a field which identifies to the player the type of media. This field is called the "booktype". There are a handful of players which will refuse to play a disc if it is not tagged with one of the "acceptable" booktypes, even though the player would physically be able to play it. From the various searching around I've done, it appears that from a physical point of view, there should be very few players that can play a -R disc that can't play a +R disc (e.g., they both have very similar reflectivities, etc.).
Most DVD writers have the ability to let you force the writing of a certain booktype field. Many of the players in the test which failed to read +R discs are likely to have done so because their firmware refused to play based on the booktype field. Setting the booktype of a +R disk to DVD-ROM or DVD-R would probably narrow the compatability gap significantly.
An excellent technical discussion of this and other issues appears on this page, near the bottom of the page.
Second point - DVD+R/RW is becoming more popular because, outside of just compatability, there are some other subtle (or not-so-subtle, depending on your application) technical advantages. The biggest one is the ability to do fine resolution (a few bit-times) lossless linking in all recording modes.
Again, the above page has an excellent technical discussion of this near the bottom (section labeled "What does the + in DVD+R/RW stand for").
The bottom line is that due to the way lossless linking is performed in DVD-R in DAO mode (the most video-compatible mode), compatibility is dependent on linking data being "corrected away" by the ECC, whereas in +R/RW, the links are physically so small that a +R sector with a link is logically indistinguishable from a DVD-ROM sector.
The primary importance of all this is that it allows real-time low-bitrate MPEG data, say from a capture card or from the internet (which will inherently cause buffer underruns due to it's low bitrate), to be directly written to DVD with compatability as high as if the data were first all written to a file and then written to DVD at once. Companies like Dell, etc., must feel that this will become a big consumer advantage because of the large amount of disk space and added inconvenience required to first store the MPEG in files and then write them to DVD.
There are also some other subtle techincal advantages which can be seen from the above document.
So, for consumers who want to do things like capture video from their camcorders and copy it to DVD in a simple manner, +R may be the best choice as long as their player is compatable (which it likely is since the compatibility gap isn't that big), whereas for someone who is producing DVDs which are to be distributed to many people with no knowlege of which player they have, -R may be better, although they could always increase compatability of +R by using the booktype field.
This Is Because DVD-R/RW is dying.
i saw five people buying DVD+R/RW media this week. this is unequivocable data that shows DVD-R/RW is on it's way out. alan greenspan was once questioned about DVD-R/RW. he accidentally farted at the time, which can only be construed as a negative opinion. if you lay out all the DVD-R/RW discs sold since it's inception, it only covers half the area of Rhode Island. shortcomings like these are why nobody uses DVD-R/RW anymore.
Just raise the taxes on crack.
It's also worth noting that DVD+RW discs are identical to pressed DVD-ROMs when it comes to reflectivities. The only hanging point is when drives don't comprehend the DVD+RW media identifier. Something that can be corrected on most drives by a program called DVD bitsetter (http://www.dvdplusrw.org/files/dvdbitsetter2113.z ip)
-- Terry
Thank you!
I wondered when somebody would mention the technical advantages of DVD+R and DVD+RW. There are good reasons why Philips and partners have taken a different route.
Mount rainier support could - when implemented correctly (grumble grumble, stupid writer programs cannot get _anything_ right) revolutionize the PC world. Finaly a large size format that you can burn easily and take to friends, modify and take back.
Maybe the DVD-R is slightly more compatible and more cheap, but are we going to make the VHS mistake all over again? With the next protocol already?
Cmon guys, vote for the better one of the two!
Maybe the DVD-R is slightly more compatible and more cheap, but are we going to make the VHS mistake all over again? With the next protocol already?
I can't help but feel that your comparison of the DVD format situation is a bit backward.
DVD-R is the VHS in the situation yes? DVD+R is the Beta right? Well which won that one? VHS won, not because it was better, it clearly wasn't, but because it was cheaper and more compatible. Beta was better, but more expensive and quite proprietary.
I keep hearing from people saying that the + format is winning, but I havn't seen any proof of that. People keep saying "The minus format is going at bargain bin prices because it's being phased out," but that falls flat on it's face quite quickly. The DVD-R format was created by the official DVD forum, they're not going to back off easily. On top of that, things get cheaper when they're sold in great quantity...so it seems to me that the "bargain bin" prices are due to the format being the acutal popular choice.
One cannot assume that just because 80% of the DVD writers going out the door at one particular store (or even chain) that THAT is the winning format. If you go to Best Buy, that's almost all they carry so that's what sells. If you go to the local computer enthusiast shops -R outsells +R quite handily. Well guess who's buying and using the DVD writers, Joe Sixpack or Joe Techie. Seems to me that the format war is far from over no matter what anyone says.
Actually, VHS won the consumer war not because it was more compatible with anything (there was really nothing to be compatible with, other than Beta, which it obviously wasn't compatible with). It won the war because it was more convenient for consumers - it was more convenient because VHS could record two hours in SP mode (a length long enough to cover most movies), when at the time, Beta could not.
DVD+R/RW has some subtle technical advantages that may turn out to give it a similar edge for consumers, like the ability to directly record variable bitrate MPEG in real time in a mode that is still highly video compatible. It's still a gamble for Phillips et al - nobody really knows whether this will end up being a big consumer advantage, but folks like Dell apparently think so, potentially enough of an advantage to overcome the slight compatibility gap. In addition, that compatibility gap is only going to get narrower (actually, better for both formats), because virtually all players being made now can play anything, and what gap exists is largely solvable with the booktype field
Still, If I were producing DVDs for distribution to many people, and I didn't want to worry about setting booktypes, it makes sense to choose DVD-R/RW at the current time. This may change though in another few years when almost everyone has replaced their really old players and the compatibility gap has narrowed to statistical insignificance.