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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.
I'm waiing for the media price to come down. The prices i've seen on the burner is competitive, but the DVD-R media is still alittle pricey for me.
you never lose in ure razorblade shoes......Beck-Hotwax
The end of CD-RWs?
A Brit in Tallahassee.
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.
Now we have CD burners and rewritable CDs that can store over 650 megabytes of data. We have writable DVDs that are able to store entire movies in very high quality video. There are countless other data storage formats such as memory sticks, smart cards, and others that can store wide ranges of amounts of data from 8 megabytes to 128 megabytes and up. So which do I use most often? My 1.44 megabyte floppy drive.
Esoteric reference.
Since DVD is a digital format, the quality of the picture isn't influenced by the quality of the burner.
This space intentionally left blank.
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...
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.
Especially if they're anything like cheap CD-ROM drives. All my moderately priced drives are still working and some are 5 years old or more. Yet the $30 52x drives usually never made it past one year . . .
I guess it depends on what film you are burning. If you are fair-using "A Wonderful Life" or "Indiana Jones" then the picture will be pretty good, but if you bootleg crossroads, it may suck.
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 decided I woudln't buy a DVD writer until plextor came out with a dual format burner (I've never had one of their CD writers mess up a single CD -- ever), and low and behold they did.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
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.
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.
With the price of media, you are far better off buying a few 80 GB IDE hard drives.
Faster too.
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.
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
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.
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?
Lump lingered last in line for brains, and the ones she got were sorta rotten and insane.
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
DVDR isos have been around for a couple years now, slowly gaining popularity (especially among console gamers). But this is going to be the real step towards mainstream DVDRs.
;)
DVD Player $40
DVD Burner $80
DVD Media $1/pop
MPAA going down like a $2 hooker... priceless.
It is now a lot cheaper to pirate DVD movies than it is to rent. Forget your Divx, delete your P2P programs. It's time to embrace the new age of digital piracy. I'll see ya all on alt.binaries.dvdr
I have no use on earth for all the "bundled" and "value added" crap they throw in with the drive, if they think the software is so freaking valuable, how about they keep it and sell me the drive for a bigger discount?
And why does the DVD software come on CDR's???
Carrefour, a french chain of big stores, is selling the LiteOn LDW401S for 99 in Belgium. This promotion is only valid today, december 6th.
The belief that 'You Gets What You Pays For' is one to live by. I have to wonder how long one of these $100 or sub-$100 burners will last.
The entire attitude of "Just toss it when it fails and get a new one" is a poor excuse. That sort of mindset is exactly why there's such a huge problem with solid waste (much of it old electronics) in the world.
While I like a bargain as much as the proverbial 'Next Guy,' I also expect equipment I buy to last a bare minimum of five years, more if the price is above a couple of hundred. I don't mind paying a bit more for stuff that's better built.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Looks like they mainly benchmarked MusicMatch against itself here - no wonder the results were identical.
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.
Just FYI there really are no "OFF" brands in the cdr/dvdr world. There are only a couple of major drive producers the two largest being Acer/Aopen and Lite-on. So the "OFF" brands like cendyne, buslink, etc are all pretty much either Acer or Lite-on drives. So if Compusa is selling a "Megapower 4xDVDR" realize that Megapower never had the R&D budget to design and make a high precision part like a DVDR. That's why they all buy them from Acer and Lite-on.
So next time your shopping keep in mind the only two things that matter are 1) who REALLY made this drive and 2) how much does it cost?
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
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.
People don't use SCSI cdroms for the speed, they use them for the bus mastering. There is no way you can run 8 DVD writers in a single machine using SATA or IDE. That is no problem with SCSI. You can get external cases with 16 drivebays, which you connect via external SCSI cable. People have them filled with CDRs or DVD writers. Imagine being able to copy a DVD to 8 drives all at the same time. Pretty cool eh?
I don't read or respond to AC posts
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?
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