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New Low Cost DVD Burners Hit The Streets
SpinnerBait writes "DVD burners, until recently, have been a bit too pricey for the average
consumer that just wants to backup large amounts of data or rescue a failing DVD
movie disc. However, OEMs like AOpen have finally broken the $100 price
point, as this
article and performance analysis at HotHardware reports. Performance,
for this sub $100 DVD burner was respectable as well, burning almost an entire
DVD's worth of data in about 15 minutes. Not too shabby at all... just in time for the holidays."
This isn't that new Best Buy has had Sub $100 DVD burners for awhile but it was with the dreaded mail in rebate...
Where ever you go, there you are.
Note that this burner only does the '+' formats. Any DVD burner worth its salt these days should be able to do both '+' and '-' formats. I'd stick with Pioneer or Sony for now -- they do all formats, have good quality/reliability, and their prices are coming down.
Also, new 8x recorders are coming.
Also, new double-layer recorders are coming.
The target is constantly moving...
Ummm, what?? I think your sorely mistaken! The quality of the picture can be greatly affected. What about movie skipping? Or not playing at all? Crashing?
I have a Sony DVD Writer in a Formac firewire case (not orig combination) and I have had no problems with the drive itself. You can download cdrecord-PRODVD which works pretty much the same as cdrecord. K3b pops up when I put a blank DVD in (kind of it isn't it?) so I can burn the DVD very easily from an .iso image or select my own data. I checked that this drive worked first here: cdrecord site . There is also DVDR tools which I haven't used. Both are free though.
I do however have occasional problems with firewire, but under SuSE 9.0 it's not stable yet.
Bored? http://www.dodgybloke.co.uk
There is a bit on the dvd that tells the software what kind of media it is. and naturally dvd+r's will say 'dvd+r' but you can override that with 'dvd-rom' and finicky dvd players will play the discs in blissful ignorance.
cdrecord supports DVD's now, practically all frontends that use cdrecord support DVD's now too (so you can use xcdroast for burning DVD's - it works for both + and -).
I got myself a LiteOn LDW-411S at Best Buy for $80 after mail in rebates. After reading a few reviews it seemed like a solid drive. The nicest thing about this one is that it does 40X CD-R, which most others only do 24X. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a lot more of these drives under $100 before and after the holidays.
Someone made a point about the cost of the media. This is very true; it's still rather expensive. However, that's mostly on the retail level. If you take a look around online, you sould be able to find really good media for $1 a piece or slightly more. Ritek is one of the brands that's hailed as highly compatible and overall very good, and you can get a spindle of 50 from newegg for about $55. Not bad!
One last thing, one of the best sites for all things DVD+-RW, check out DVDRHelp.com.
Livewarehouse has the NEC-1300A 4X/-R/-RW/+R/+RW for $103 shipped, if you are a bit nervous about buying these off brand drives.
Note that the reviewed drive came with software (the NEC-1300A doesn't), but the reviewer didn't use it.
Why is that, you might ask? Well, because most of the video to DVD software is a complete crapshoot, depending on your particular machine and capture card, etc. Blasting the DVD is the easy part.
I spent a good number of hours *just last night* (yawn) running down just exactly what software would work with my setup (Intel D845PEBT2 mobo, AverTV stereo). Nero 6 Ultra? Nope. Roxio VideoWave 5? Nope. MainActor? Nope. Power VCR II? Yep, we have a winner.
After my experience, no way would I pay extra to get a recorder plus software unless I knew for a fact that software would work on my computer. If not, better to buy a bare drive and try the test drive download versions of various retail software until you find one that works for you.
For burning anything (audio CDs, data CDs, mixed CDs, DVDs, eMovix projects...) K3b is king. Never found a better burning frontend (including on Windows).
Don't worry about burning stuff under Linux, that problem seems solved for the time being, which is way cool.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
No... it's the end of FLOPPIES! :)
I remember as a kid going from a 170k single sided 5.25 in my Commodore to a 1.44 meg 3.5" disk in my PC and thinking "Wow! I'll never use all that storage space!" Of course, I said the same thing about my 1 GB hard drive that cost me $300, and my CD-R (not RW!) that cost nearly as much.
Needless to say, this might just be the time for me to acquire a DVD burner - Staples has a nice DVD burner for $129 after rebate that does support DVD -R[W] and +R[W]
-Rick
How about a dual format burner for $101.99 delivered?
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
For information on just about anything related to DVD/CD recording, DVDRHelp.com is a great resource.
While they seem to be the first with dual layer disks and the drives themselves are cheaper the media is more expensive. -R also seems to be more compatable with normal DVD technology.
No sir I dont like it.
-F
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
Carrefour, a french chain of big stores, is selling the LiteOn LDW401S for 99 in Belgium. This promotion is only valid today, december 6th.
I had the same concern. A year ago when I started looking at DVD burners I intended to convert movies from VHS to DVD and even make my own movies (family camcorder movies and photo slideshows). I noticed there was DVD-R, +R, -RW, +RW. What the heck is all this?
After checking out this site I learned that the formats -R and -RW were not standardized. Apparently some companies jumped the gun before the format was fully worked out. This would explain why 'some' DVD's I rented would not play. Thus +R and +RW was born. The story is these new formats are what everyone will be supporting on your DVD players for the future. This is what I bought though I highly recommend a burner which does all the above mentioned formats (just in case).
My burner only does the +R/+RW format which seems to work on just about every new DVD player I've come across. I did notice a few older models which were unable to play my movies. They were pre 1999 models (so far). I always warn people when they buy a player to check what formats it will support.
BTW, that dvdrhelp.com web site is great! They have tons of info on burners, players, editing software, how to convert formats and so on. Very good site to bookmark if you are serious about making movies, capturing or editing them.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
Addonics makes such a bridge board here. Note their comment about compatibility. Also, AMS makes two styles here that use the 3611 chip according to their data sheets.
Why do we need it right now?
For exactly the reasons you stated - not speed. One standard, smaller cables and connectors, removal of the Master/Slave crap (and not for Political Correctness reasons).
I'd go with IEEE1394 too, but now the reason against that appears to be cost...
Lump lingered last in line for brains, and the ones she got were sorta rotten and insane.
Yes, but you need to have software that shrinks DVD-9 (9 gig) movies down to the 4.5 gig barrier. DVDXCOPY does this as well as the guides on doom9.org
I thought most +R's don't play in most home DVD players? Is this still the case?
It was never the case. What is true is that -RW discs are significantly more compatible than +RW, particularly on older players, and also that -R seems to be infinitesimally more compatible than +R. And also, no matter what disc type you use, burners never seem to produce discs which are 100% compatible with all readers. This was true even of CDR but appears to be much more of a problem with recordable DVD. It would be nice if the next advance is a single standard and not so finicky as DVD+/-R. Personally I think they should skip the blu-ray level 20-25GB, wait a few more years, and release a 75-100GB format.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
The site that the MPAA does not want you to know about!
SpinnerBait writes "DVD burners, until recently, have been a bit too pricey for the average consumer WHO just wants to backup large amounts of data, or rescue a failing DVD movie disc. However, OEMs like AOpen have finally broken the $100 price point, as this article and performance analysis at HotHardware reports. PerformanceNO COMMA for this sub $100 DVD burner was respectable as well, burning almost (Performance was burning?)an entire DVD's worth of data in about 15 minutes. Not too shabby at all... just in time for the holidays."
Cover your eyes and click this link!
Quality loss?! Thats half the bitrate! Does it give you the option of splitting across two disks?
Yes, there would be quality loss. But remember, the bitrate would still be a sky-high 4000 kbps. Have you ever seen an SVCD before? I burn those all the time. I can encode nearly perfect quality video, much better than VHS, at 2000 kbps. You don't see any artifacting at all unless you get close and examine the picture carefully. At double the bitrate, burned DVDs would hardly be lacking for quality, assuming whoever encoded it knew what they are doing, and used a good encoder like TMPGENC.
However, there will be dual layer burners coming out in March. These will store 9 gigs just like the commercially produced dvds. Although I'm sure the media would be ridiculously overpriced.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
I pasted the URL on the subject line because I don't expect to be modded up. The URL points to the second most popoular DVD burning backend on Linux, dvd+rw-tools. Most uninformed Linux users will point to dvdrecord, which is basically just a patch applied to the opensource version of cdrecord (cdrecord-proDVD is a binary-only release). It's also availabe here, as a pure patch. The author of cdrecord, Joerg Schilling, is well-known for his dislike of dvdrecord, which he considers "illegal" as it purportedly violates certain provisions of the GPL. Andy Polyakov's dvd+rw-tools, on the other hand, is a totally independent implementation, at least as far as the burn strategy is concerned. For the creation of the burn data, it uses mkisofs as a backend. Despite the name, dvd+rw-tools can also burn -R/W!
Actually you can use a left-hand product called DVD shrink that will let you control the level of compression on each file and optionally delete things of little value such as language tracks, lame extra features and so on. Finally, it flattens menus; by that I mean that if you notice on mainstream DVD menus they are animated in some fashion. This means there is extra space on the dvd being taken up by that video file. Flattening simply takes a screen shot of that video file and that becomes your menu. You would be surprised at how much space on a dvd is taken up by such things.
The point is that you can keep the compression on main feature at 100% and trim the rest down in many different ways and still bring it down to 4.7 gigs so the quality loss is pretty much a non-issue if you know what you are doing. Having lost hundreds of dollars-worth of paid-for commercial DVDs to scratches and so on, a tool like this is priceless because it gives you the security that the MPAA and buddies can't or won't.
Well, using Nero 5.5.10.54 with my Ricoh RW5240A (which writes +R/+RW with 4x) lets me set the book type without problems. And yes, the one video DVD I've burned with it using DVD-Shrink to make it fit on the disc played flawlessly in my rather old Pioneer DV 525.
Oh, and I got it for 99,90 EUR at a local electronics store. (Granted, that makes around 120 USD, but it still fits that "just below 100 $CURRENCY" marketing gimmick... :)
np: Triosk Meets Jan Jelinek - Theme From Trioskinek (1+3+1)
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
A much better solution is to use the regular cdrecord with growisofs, which lets you lay down and grow an ISO9660 file system on (as well as to burn an arbitrary pre-mastered image to) all supported DVD media.