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Dell Throws In For The +R/+RW Standard
srothroc writes "Dell has been selling DVD+R burners for a while, but now they're tossing them in on free deals with some decent everyday consumer systems. I wonder if this increased support from one of two companies to pull a profit on PCs is going to tip the scale towards the +R format... If not, what's going to happen to the Dell users who have all of these +R drives if it turns out that -R wins out in the long run?"
If not, what's going to happen to the Dell users who have all of these +R drives if it turns out that -R wins out in the long run?
Fuck 'em. My friend never got reimbursed for his choice of a Bernoulli drive, and that was a lot more than 100 bucks down the drain.
Sometimes you bet on the wrong horse. It happens.
--saint
DVDs will forever READ both +R and -R. If -R were to win right now, in 1-2 years you wouldn't be able to buy DVD+R discs. That means you'd have to buy a new drive. That's not unreasonable for 1-2 years.
If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor - Albert Einstein
As unfortunate as that is. +R media tends to be slightly cheaper for some reason, but -R is the more compatible of the two formats. Regardless there are lots of dual-format drives being made and sold at quite reasonable prices these days, so there is no real danger that +R will disappear any time soon, though it probably should.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I get the feeling the world will move on to the next major jump in burning capacity, and probably another format war, rather than actually settle on +R or -R. Unless the industry as a whole decides on one format or the other, and decides to leave a whole section of consumers out in the cold, neither format will "win."
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
I can't believe this. Someone links to a Dell ad for a free DVD burner, and now all of a sudden, "it's a shift in the industry". What the fuck, April Fool's isn't for another few months!
How long has then "battle" been going on now? I don't see either giong away anytime soon and only after they are replaced by a new disc or medium. They will both sit around and when 1 goes so does the other. In the mean time, the combo drives that burn either format will dominate as their prices reach the same level as the format specific drives.
The Tools Of Ignorance wanna be a tool?
All single-format recorders, such as +RW drives, are effectively end-of-line items, so Dell can buy up inventories at knock-down prices. If they could have got -RW at a buck cheaper, they'd have gone that way, there is no other reason! Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
Just because something is the norm doesn't mean it should be acceptable. We're already generating enough waste as a society without this sort of give-away of soon-to-be obsolete technology.
The CB App. What's your 20?
First off, why people don't buy and use more of those multistandard units... it's beyond me. You know, those drives guaranteed to support all formats: -R, -RW, +R, +RW... They're really nice.
:-(
I have a Sony DRU-510 burner, it supports every conceivable format, and works very well.
Second, many units (DVD readers, not writers) that claim that they support only one standard (only -R/RW or only +R/RW) actually do work with the other standard. I don't have exact numbers, but it seems to me that the vast majority of the new drives support de facto all standards. Just try it, you might be suprised.
Then, -R/RW has the advantage of a slightly larger compatibility. There's a lot of slightly older units that, for the majority, support only the "minus" disks.
Every single device that i own and has DVD capabilities is multistandard (knows both "plus" and "minus" disks), however all DVDs that i create for my own purposes are -R, just because of this slightly larger compatibility.
Finally, i wish i had a magic of sorts, to get together all those morons who are responsible for inflicting standard wars on us poor customers. Then i'll only ask to give me, for twenty minutes, a machine gun with lots of ammo. It has to be a model which withstands very long shooting sessions without melting or jamming. After twenty minutes, i'll call you to show you what machine-gun-generated meat pulp looks like.
I'm really pissed off on these stupid issues.
> Remember 56k modems. There was US Rebotic's X2, and Rockwells K56Flex. Which one was the winner? V90.
:)
And when V90 won, I flashed my USR Courier to support it, and so I was a winner too
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
...or perhaps Dell just overstocked on +R drives and is now trying to liquidate them by throwing them in free as a promo...
HD-DVD IS the standard as proclaimed by the DVD Forum anyway. When HD-DVD is sold in the U.S. and Europe it will be HD-DVD you see in the stores - nothing else. This is what the movie manufacturers agreed on through the DVD Forum.
My prediction is that Blu-Ray will find its niche in backup applications and video production houses. This is due to it's greater production expense (dual head for compatibility as opposed to HD's single lensing) and better media longevity (sealed discs).
Remember Betacam Vs. VHS? It's the same thing all over again. Betacam is STILL the standard in production houses all over the world but it was VHS that ruled the home front.
As for China's weird-ass format, guess what? No one really cares but the Asian markets and media/players/recorders will be made specifically for those markets as needed. Shocking, I know, I know. Proof? The Asian markets have been ignored by Americans before now. Take a look at the popularity of VCD players over there and you'll see what I mean. How many dedicated VCD players have you seen sold/marketed here?
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
For us early adopters even as far back as one year ago could not know that DVD+R would pull ahead, because:
DVD-R was first
DVD-R was cheaper
DVD-R media was cheaper
DVD-R was more compatible
So for at least two years, DVD-R had an advantage. However, given how competition works, are you saying/suggesting DVD-R won't catch up, the way DVD+R did? It's a moot point in that my next system will use whatever standard is most advantageous to me, but I do believe that competition is a good thing, and without DVD-R being there first, DVD+R would not have worked so hard to win; and now that DVD+R has the advantage, this will spur DVD-R manufacturers post haste, I think.
GPL Deconstructed
Correction there - Betacam never competed with VHS. It was Betamax that was in competition with VHS, and no studios ever really used it. Betacam SP is whats used in the studios, and being a high res (>400 lines of resolution) format, recording in component video, it was never intended to be a home video format.
The same people who are scrambling to squeeze the last pennies out of their media catalogs with DRM are the ones screwing up the usability of the media. They never figured out how to standardize audio on a DVD, even though they now distribute audio on DVD in different data formats. And now they're even screwing up the DVD media format, with incompatible DVD-R, +R, and likely more to come. This is what happens when infotainment execs get their competitive paws on the reigns of technology. They don't understand anything except keeping power concentrated in their own boardroom, even when distributing access would make them more money from a unified market. They should just treat all these storage devices are data devices, instead of branding them with a premium, at the expense of compatibility.
--
make install -not war
what's going to happen to the Dell users who have all of these +R drives if it turns out that -R wins out in the long run?
You wait the two years that it'll take to make them obsolete and then you buy a $19.99 drive (after rebates).
It's just the same as buying a $19.99 CD-RW now when they were $100 a couple of years ago. Prices drop. Does it really matter what you get for free now as you won't be paying current prices for a drive in two years time?
Well, I wouldn't go so far as to make claims that DVD-R can "be read in almost anything". Believe me.... I went through a bunch of hassle trying to make a DVD movie that played back properly on the DVD players I had around here (and the ones my friends and family owned). Just for that limited scope of usage, DVD-R had issues. For one, I had a fairly expensive Toshiba DVD set-top player that didn't seem to work with any recordable media at all. My Playstation 2 would at least attempt to play movies on DVD-R media, but it had problems reading as it got towards the end of almost-full discs. It would begin stuttering and skipping, and usually just freeze up at some point.
I also tried DVD+R though, and it's decidedly LESS compatible than -R for this type of thing. Where +R (and +RW) shine is with a better feature-set and design for working with packet-writing data.
I think the bottom line is, compatibility for *both* formats will only improve as people get rid of their old DVD set-top players and replace them with newer models. Most of the problems lie in what the firmware is capable of that's inside the player siting on someone's TV set.
Slap in a DVD-/+RW drive and just don't tell anyone.
The reason they don't tell is because that's not always true. Apple uses several different brands of drive, some of which support RW, some of which don't. Apple avoids that kind of inconsistency both for marketing and support purposes. It's easier to say "All of our SuperDrives support DVD-R." than "SuperDrives in models X, Y, and Z, revision B, built in the Fall, during the full moon, support DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD-XYZ, DVD-GLTH..." and so on.
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