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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.
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 . . .
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
The site that the MPAA does not want you to know about!
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.