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."

Comments

How about media ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dual layer burners ? Great.

How about dual layer media ? Any mention of availability and price ?

MPAA can cry all they want

[Overzeetop]

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)

DL recording by firmware hack

[TeknoHog]

When rumours of DL burners first came about, I thought of the obvious thing that's also mentioned in the article: Since all DVD players can focus the laser onto two layers, what's stopping any of the current DVD burners from dual layer burning? (Except the lack of firmware, of course.)

Or maybe I'm just desperate having purchased a vanilla DVD burner a few months ago...

Re:I don't care if they're slow.

[Overzeetop]

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).

Re:Yes.

[jridley]

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.

Disney Commercials on DVD

[stecoop]

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.

What about price and compatibility?

[DroopyStonx]

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.