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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."
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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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
Yes, we don't have a clear winner... but we do have a clear loser :)
I would say the biggest incompatability is the authors grasp of the english language. But seriously, I think it's time we all accept that neither format is going to die at this point and just focus on buying PLAYERS that will best play all formats... The player is the cheapest link in this chain anyway. At that point, people can decide to record on - or + based on their preference for the price/feature aspect of the media... "Do I want to pay .50 less for my disc or do I want to be able to rewrite files on the disc without erasing the whole thing?" Every situation will be different. There's no excuse for a player to come out today that doesn't fully support both formats, and THAT is where our focus should be.
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.
;-)
Sheesh. You people are so frickin' lazy...
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I would want any player I buy to be compatible with Sony and Philips as well as Panasonic for the same reason that I want any memory card reader I buy to be able to read Compact Flash and Secure Digital and Smart Media AND Memory Stick.... Because I can't control what people write things on or with, but I can control whether I can read them or not.
Stop wasting your time trying to kill a format that will not go away and just embrace what is and make sure it won't cost you the ability to watch a DVD because you are stuck on your principles.
Use your $$$ to buy the writer/media you prefer and let that be your vote in the format war, but refusing to push for readers that don't choke on one disc or the other is silly. They're just readers. Panasonic making their readers choke on DVD+R discs is no better than M$ making Netscape choke on content from its website. Be better than that.
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.
you also don't know how far from the truth you are.
There are royalties on DVD-R media and DVD+R isn't owned by Sony. It's got patents from many companies combined, (like -R/-RW) but is mostly owned by Sony and Philips with Philips having the larger half. (Just like the CD).
+R is hardly a cheap knockoff, it's designed to be superior to -R for multiple reasons, like listed in the link, including hardware defect management and being less prone to error.
by the way, minidisk is still amazingly popular. just not in the US. japan and asia, for example, you can find almost as many minidisk products as cd products (including media). just the cd media is larger.
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!
I would say the biggest incompatability is the authors grasp of the english language.
I would say the biggest incompatibility is the author's grasp of the English language.