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New Low Cost DVD Burners Hit The Streets

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the budget-disc-creation dept.

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."

5 of 273 comments (clear)

  1. This must be... by AzBats · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The end of CD-RWs?

    --
    A Brit in Tallahassee.
  2. Compatability? by 77Punker · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  3. Are these low cost DVD Burners Linux Compatible by HidingMyName · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. That's why they're cheap by gilesjuk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  5. So what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.