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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.
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
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.
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.