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First DVD+R9 Burners Reviewed
Hack Jandy writes "DVD dual-layer burners finally seem ready for the public - today, a review of the Sony DRU-700A was posted by Anandtech, and teasers of the BenQ 830A posted at CDRInfo.com. Unfortunately, the drives seem too slow to to really warrant a purchase."
I haven't been keeping up- I predicted the end of the year. Then again, reading the review I'm not sure I'd want one now anyway.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Dual layer burners ? Great.
How about dual layer media ? Any mention of availability and price ?
I use my drive for data backup. At less than $1 a disc, I do full weekly backups of all my (in-house generated) business data for my engineering firm. At the current rate, I'll cross the 4.3GB threshold sometime in fall '04. These will be out in quantity just in time. I know, there are ways to get better compression out of a (mostly) static data set than backing it all up, but recovery is far faster this way. If my drive dies, I can restore the entire thing in less than 20 minutes. If I screw up a single file, I can just go to the most recent backup - not have to sift through a multi-generational backup set. And with what I saved on dedicated backup software, I can buy a new DVD+9 drive and another year's worth of discs.
(yes, my main applications drive is bigger than 4.3G...it's about 60GB. That's why it gets imaged by Ghost on a removable drive once a week. Yes, I've tested it...swap the primary with the backup and it's transparent. I sleep much better knowing that in the event of a major HD crash, I'm less than $100 billable time from being back in business)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
So, who's going to be the first person to explain to me why we can't fit the same amount of data on one of these as movie companies can fit on theirs?
graspee
Or maybe I'm just desperate having purchased a vanilla DVD burner a few months ago...
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
This may be slightly off topic, but can someone tell me which is the better burner/media to get, the +R or the -R? Also, I've seen some media that says +R and the RW but it's only write once. What is the skinny on all of these R's?
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Gosh, is it so hard to tell that he meant "un-re-compressed"? Of course DVDs are compressed, but DVD-9 means the ability to back up a DVD verbatim. There are reasons to want to do this (some are even legal).
DVD-shrink will still have its purposes, though. I've run a couple of my daughter's Disney DVDs through it so (1) she'd never touch my originals and (2) it plays the movie directly - no menus, no commercials, no format setup screens.
I'm actually thinking about how many of AB's Good Eats I can cram onto one disc - they take up a lot of room in the jukebox at just 3 episodes per disc. I just need a way to get a "top level" menu to access all the original content without a buttload of re-authoring. Dual sided would be even better (since the jukebox can flip a disc internally).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Exactly. The computer is way more than fast enough to burn a DVD while doing many other tasks. Even a 1x burn (~2 hours on 9GB) is fine as long as the drive and software is stable.
I don't _need_ DVD-9 capability for backups, but it is nice to know is available in a "pro-sumer" device. In that sense, two DVD-5s at 2x or better would be quicker but that also takes more user time.
I'm willing to take a bargain on 1x media because I don't burn discs very often. If I was into DVD authoring, then it might be more important if you have to beat the FedEx drop-off deadline, so it would be a few more dimes for faster media.
I'll note I didn't RTFA yet, I just wanted to get my two cents in on the speed issue before I read it.
I have an 8x burner, but I'm too cheap to buy the media. I can burn at 4x and do firewire video cap (to the same IDE drive the burn's happening from), have SETI running, be browsing under Mozilla web (10+ tabs open) and email, and have Agent downloading and decoding NNTP binaries at the same time, and have a half dozen terminal windows open to various headless boxes, and nothing's suffering. The write buffers are hovering around 97%, no dropped frames on the video, and all my GUI are stable. Win2K, 2.5 GHz Athlon XP.
This is all with totally standard consumer equipment. No SCSI, just a group of Maxtor 160GB drives sitting on a Maxtor/Promise controller in the PCI slot, in an ABit mainboard. Boot/swap drive is plugged into the mainboard.
If you're getting I/O bound on a > 1 GHz machine at 4x write, you may have config problems. Check and make sure your writer is running in UDMA mode, and your drive isn't horribly fragmented.
Your post is the most underrated yet in regards to the Disney commercials and menus. Very few fully know what you mean about ripping Disney DVDs so your sibling doesn't have to touch the original and what a pain all those commercials & menus really are, Especially when you change a DVD every 45 minutes or so. I recently bought my first DVD burner and ripped out those 30 minute commercials with menus; you simply insert the DVD and walk away. My wife kisses me every time the movie automatically start to play and the children get quiet for a few minutes of the day. My burner has paid for itself many times over with the amount of time I saved by not having to forward through that garage.
If you were a real man, you do what I did:
rip them all to DIVX and put them on a central server with a multimediaPC attached to the television. Mplayer allows you to either manually fastforward the scary parts, or create scripts to jump overthem alltogether. Plus you never have go looking for the damn things from room to room
This was confusing me, too, but I found this chart in the DVD FAQ which does seem to indicate that pressed dual layer DVDs are also limited to 7.95GB.
Can any DVD experts confirm that pressed dual layer discs have the same storage capacity as DVD+R DL discs?
Unfortunately your calculation is flawed.
720 x 576 is the amount of pixels per frame not the amount of storage required.
To calculate the size in kilobytes (KiB) of one frame of uncompressed video, use the following formula:
Frame size K = ([Pixel Width x Pixel Height x Bit Depth] / 8) / 1024
Where 8 represents an 8-bit byte, and 1024 equals the number of bytes per kilobytes. For example, the size in kilobytes of an uncompressed frame of full-size (720 x 576), 24-bits (per pixel) DVD video is:
Frame size K = ([720 x 576 x 24] / 8) / 1024
= 1215 KiB
Then for one second it's just
= 1215 x 30
= 36450 KiB
Therefore for 90 mins it is:
= 36450 x 60 x 90
= 196830000 KiB
= 187.7 GiB
Remember this is only for dvd video not the audio.
No one mentions those, but they will be an issue.
One DVD9 will be more expensive than purchasing two separate DVD5s. What's the point in using it, then? I could see if current DVD-R prices dropped to 50 cents a disc and the DVD9's took over the $1-2 range, but it doesn't look as if it will be that way.
And compatibility... if your DVD player is able to play DVD-R and DVD-RW, would it play DVD-R/RW DL without any issues? It might be fine for data backup, but if you can't copy movies and watch them, then that's a problem.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
DvdShrink's quality is awful.
Honestly, I only use it to strip out what I don't need to make an uncompressed backup. Then I fire up Intervideo DVD Copy to shrink down and burn--it has absolutely the best compression I've ever seen. Often times you can't tell the difference between the original and the copy. Not to mention, it's much faster than DVD Shrink's "Deep Analysis."
Seriously, I've been putting off buying a DVD burner until these new dual-layers came out.
First thing I'm gonna do is backup my Extended Edition LOTR DVDs (all 8 of 'em...soon to be 12 when ROTK comes out). I'm sick of fumbling with those big foldout booklets, and the collector's geek in me doesn't want to be handling all that stuff all the time and instead keep it in the box.