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."

Comments

This must be...

[AzBats]

The end of CD-RWs?

Compatability?

[77Punker]

Will these DVD's play on all decent players? It doesn't really matter how cheap these are until they actually work. Last I heard about these devices is that there's many formats what aren't interchangeable.

Re:Compatability?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it said +,not +&-

Are these low cost DVD Burners Linux Compatible

[HidingMyName]

I realize these may be foolish questions, but I don't own any DVD Drives (but that might change). Do DVD burners/drives have an interface standard and what is the status of Linux support (e.g. is it like cdrecord)? If not, are any of these drives supported? Have DVD drive owners been happy with Linux run time support? And finally are there any good GUI wrappers, for CDs they have xcdroast, which does what I want.

That's why they're cheap

[gilesjuk]

Any sensible person will wait for dual layer drives. Will be able to backup DVD films and fit nearly twice as much data on a disc. Not to mention you can still do single layer if you really have to.

for backup this would suck

[Anonymous Coward]

With the price of media, you are far better off buying a few 80 GB IDE hard drives.

Faster too.

Re:Expensive Media

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I've been buying my Imation spindles at $5 for 50, so make that a dime.

I will say that I prefer DVD simply because it is a lot fewer discs to handle and I don't have to prune less necessary files so often.

So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, maybe you need a reason to use DVD-R as it might, sometimes be more capatible with more DVD players. This is not as big an issue as it used to be though.

However, for general computer usage you flat out can not beat DVD+RW. It's sorta like flash media in that it has a limited number of write operations but it allows completely random access. This is great because you can use the DVD almost like a hard-drive. It's better to use a filesystem that limits rewriting the same spot too many times (like the flash filesystems) but you can use pretty much any filesystem you want. Plus, at 4.7 GB it holds a lot more than any flash media and for a lot less cost. I love it.

I own the Sony DRX-500ULX which handles any format out there and I have to say that I mostly only use DVD+RW for computer stuff. I've never had a problem with the DVD+RW media in any DVD-ROM or DVD player I've tried.

SATA anyone?

[Ignominious Cow Herd]

Why aren't we seeing any SATA CD/DVD drives yet? Is there some technical reason? How long do we have to wait to see the end of PATA support?

Do the reviewers have a clue?

[trampel]

I thought the review was OK, until I read at the end:

In our last test we loaded MusicMatch 8.0 and a 69 minute audio disc to test the drives capabilities while ripping MP3s. We set the quality to 192Kbps and turned off error correction to show the best possible performance attainable with each drive.

Looks like they mainly benchmarked MusicMatch against itself here - no wonder the results were identical.

What about digital restrictions management?

[Anonymous Coward]

A review of hardware, yet the site fails to mention if the drive has any digital restrictions management in the firmware.

Can I play/rip the music and videos that I own without encumbering restrictions?

Can I play/rip the music and videos that I own without worrying about loosing keys?

Can I play/rip the music and videos that I own on the multiple digital devices that I own in multiple locations without restrictions?

Can I easily make back up copies, or transfer across my lan for backup/streaming/archiving, the music and videos that I own?

Will the drive's full functionality be available to me on my linux powered computers?

Aren't these questions relevant to a hardware review of audio/video hardware?

Why aren't these questions being answered in the review? Are all hardware sites going to conform to this model? How do I find out about digital restrictions management in hardware if the review sites make no mention of it?

Re:So can you copy a movie DVD?

[Monkelectric]

You dont have a 62" HDTV. VCD's are unwatchable and artifacts are visible on even well encoded (original) DVDs.