Another Format War: DVD -R9 v. +R9

Anonymous Coward writes "Just when we thought the dust settled on the last format war between CD-R's we see a new one brewing with DVD recordable discs. DVD -R9/+R9 will apparently be the next technological slugfest where there are no rewards for second place. With all of these new recording format options made available to the public, how can any consumer intelligently know which one to buy into?"

Comments

Easy

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

how can any consumer intelligently know which one to buy into?

Easy: stick to what's proven. For me it's CDRs. I won't even touch DVD-Rs until I stop reading a million different labels at the store.

Re:Easy

[Covener]

Get Ritek DVD-/+Rs. They're the best, most reliable quality discs on the market right now. Amazon has some deals on them right now.

No, they're mediocre. You can get much better quality if you're willing to pay for it.

Re:Easy

[William Baric]

1) CD-R cost more than DVD-R per MB (at least in Canada). Of course, if you use only 2 or 3 CDs a month then I guess you simply don't need DVDs. For someone who use 20 or 30 CDs a month, DVDs are a much better deal.

2) My weekly backup is about 1.8 GB. Using ONE DVD+RW is much simpler than THREE CD-RW.

3) A 8x DVD recorder is FASTER than a 52x CD recorder.

3) There will always be something "better". Will you wait forever ? Who cares if DVDs are obsolete in 5 years. Anyway CDs will become obsolete pretty fast too.

Maybe you don't know this, but most DVD players can read BOTH DVD-R and DVD+R. It's not like the VHS / Betamax war.

Re:Easy

[NanoGator]

"Easy: stick to what's proven. For me it's CDRs. I won't even touch DVD-Rs until I stop reading a million different labels at the store."

For me, it's the occasional new hard drive + firewire bay.

My beef with DVD-Rs isn't compatibility, it's longevity. It doesn't take much to screw up a DVD.

Re:Easy

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Confusing and proven are two different things. Writable DVDs have been available since 1999 or earlier.

Besides, with a writable DVD, you can cut disc swapping to a sixth that of CD, waste less material and storage space in exchange. And you can do some home video authoring experiments that will work in nearly any DVD player.

I really don't see it being that confusing either.

If by proven you mean archive-once and put it in a vault, well, even CD-R hasn't proven itself because that format isn't much more than a decade old now, so there's no real-world tests that they last two or three decades either.

Re:Easy

[Alorelith]

I usually buy Riteks too. Sure, there are better buys, but for the money these are pretty good. I only buy +R, because they can be bitset to DVD-ROM, bypassing all those problems that some people have with their standalone players not playing DVD+R or DVD-R.

Re:Easy

[Bodysurf]

NoMoreCoasters.

The very best media are, in this order:

1. Pioneer (Discontinued but are a great find if you find some old stock somewhere)
2. Maxell (Made in Japan ones)
3. Taiyo-Yuden
4. Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation (Verbatim 4X/8X)

I avoid everything else as much as possible. Ritek's have gone to total crap as of late.

Re:Easy

[Mordanthanus]

Uh... believe it or not, some of us don't like having to switch through several discs during a restore operation because someone thought of the "great" idea of incremental backups. As little as this stuff costs nowdays, it's easier to use a bigger medium. I do a full data backup once a week. And it does take a DVD.

Do the same as w/ the current generation

[digThisXL]

Buy a drive that supports both formats.

Re:Do the same as w/ the current generation

[Pharmboy]

Buy a drive that supports both formats.

It's not that simple. You still have to pick a media, either -R9 or +R9, and most people prefer to use a single media type, myself included. This complicates future compatibility, if you pick the "wrong" media. Most DVD ROMs in the future will be able to read both, but that is not guaranteed. You can argue that "anyone can read up and make an intellegent decision" but the majority of people don't or won't take the time. So they continue to use CDROM burners instead.

The problem with multiple standards is that this causes confusion. Even I just bought my first burner for home (have one at work) and still not sure which formats will properly play in any DVD player. I'm pretty hardcore and oldschool in my geekiness, but I put it off for so long to keep from getting the "wrong" type.

By adopting a single standard (think "open"), you will increase the total volume of DVD burners simply because there is no confusion, and it becomes more of a commodity item. Perhaps manufacturers do not want this, since this would drive prices (margins) down while it increased volume.

Re:Do the same as w/ the current generation

[dabadab]

Could you point to a burner that does support both DVD-R9 and DVD+9? Or, could you point to a drive that supports DVD-9R?
No?
Thought so.
Currently there are only DVD+R9 drives on the market and that makes choice pretty simple.

A winner is you!

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, why can't these people work this out once and for all so that we don't have to buy DVD drives that support seven hundred formats?

Re:A winner is you!

[aksuur]

Because the companies backing both formats have put too much money into developing and promoting them to just give them up. That's the way business goes.

Familiarity wins

[r_glen]

...how can any consumer intelligently know which one to buy into?

My guess is that they'll buy into whichever format they current use for single-layer discs.

To answer your question

[over_exposed]

"how can any consumer intelligently know which one to buy into?"

They won't. They havn't been able to since CD-R and CD-RW started confusing grandma and grandpa. This just adds more confusion to the casual computer user.

Re:To answer your question

[over_exposed]

And some of the most seemingly intelligent customers I've ever helped couldn't point out the difference between a stick of RAM and a hard drive... Some people have it, some people don't.

Dual Format Dirves

[jeffy210]

As long as they keep making +/- drives, I really don't care. Most all systems can read from either of them, and has long as you have a +/- drive you can write to either of them.

Re:Dual Format Dirves

[zakezuke]

Most all systems can read from either of them, and has long as you have a +/- drive you can write to either of them.

Systems are not that big a deal. Sure some people gotta update their DVD's firmware, but this is trivial. I must admit that I had to buy a new drive to do DVD -/+R for my old Samsung just refused to take it, but again this was $30 and trivial. The real problem is standalone players. My Magnavox for example refuses to play +R media. It's 5 disk surround sound deal with a replacement cost between $100-$200 or so. That's slightly less trivial. People don't want to buy a new DVD player every 1.5 years just because we can't agree on one format.

Part of the reason people buy into DVD burners is so they can burn videos and share them. In the 20th century, this wasn't a problem. If you wanted to share your home movies you just made a copy onto VHS with 100% assurance that it would be playable. While it's cool to burn a DVD in well under 1/2 the time it takes to play it, it's not cool when the best you can assure people is, "It might work."

Re:Dual Format Dirves

[Babbster]

(Meaning it was $50)

(If the company comes through with the rebate)

Intelligent?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since where are consumers intelligent?

Exactly!

[kisielk]

It's hard enough already as it is. I'm still wondering if I should wait for dual layer or just go ahead and buy a single layer writer now. The drives are available now, though not nearly as large of a selection as single layer, especially when it comes to external drives. Dual layer media is currently not readily available retail here in western Canada and reportedly will not be till early next year, and then there will be yet ANOTHER format? What a pain! In contrast, I've had my CD-RW for over 4 years now, it's been the same media and format the whole time. Upgrading CPU's, video cards, memory etc is not such a big deal, but constantly changing media formats for your removable disks is a hassle. A hard drive will work in any machine (even SATA ones have adapters available), but these new DVD types will likely require drives that support them. You can't count on everyone to upgrade their DVD drives every year so you will be able to transfer data to them...

Have they learned nothing?

[NMerriam]

Dear God, i wonder what these execs are thinking sometimes. Don't they realize how much trouble the +- wars caused in consumer acceptance of DVD Recorders?

And in the end of course it didn't make any difference whatsoever because as new hardware and software came out, the negligible differences and advantages each format had became fairly unimportant.

I still have nightmares about the guy who wouldn't let me leave Best Buy until I explained to him what kind of discs he needed for his computer.

Well...if you want max performance you might care.

[FatSean]

I know my Plextor DVD writer accepts both + and - media of the R and RW type, but it only writes at top speed on the DVD+R (or is it -R hehe) media.

Maybe other makes are different.

Re:This is why...

[Mike deVice]

You know what's horrible? I've stacks and stacks of 3.5 floppies. And they're everywhere... I found one under a couch cushion recently. The worst part is that even though I haven't touched any of them in ages, I simply can't bring myself to toss them out. Who knows when I may need that lil collection of GIFs from 1994. And I'm too lazy to move em to CD-R. *sigh*

Why should the average consumer care?

[Neo-Rio-101]

The way things are going, it seems even less likely to me to even need a CD/DVD drive a great deal.

With faster internet connectivity, DVD or any removable drive media will probably go the way of the dinosaur - save for backup purposes, and those that backup probably should use a RAID array in an encrypted file server on a network.

Even today you can get your software collection on CD and back them up into iso files or any other format, and then load it on a virtual drive, ala "Daemon tools".

The average consumer will most likely just stick to a DVD player, and a DVD writer that makes video play on said DVD player. Who the hell cares about the different formats?

Re:I don't care.

[Anonymous Coward]

How the hell has this competition benefited you?

Has either format improved? It just means every drive has to pay royalties and implementation on both formats!

We live in ficticious times, with a ficticious war

[DroopyStonx]

There is no format war. I heard this same story back when DVD+/- R first came out. Guess what? Out of the 7 or 8 dvd playing devices I've ever owned, not ONE of them fails to read either format (including PS2).

Reason being, the big companies want to sell their drives and will almost always make them both + and - compatible.

The reason I say most and not all is because there's always some goon out there creating drives that can only read one format (for whatever reason). These drives never usually sell very well.

Change the Booktype on +R for better compatability

[brywalker]

Just get a recorder that has bitsetting (NEC 2510a with hacked firmware) and you can change the booktype to DVD-ROM. That way older players will play them just as well as -R and original media.

Re:Marketing psychology

[robhall]

Although most consumers are already familiar with CD-R and CD-RW so they may feel more comfortable with a -.

Does it really matter?

[BCW2]

The winner will be the group that comes in at the lowest price, just like always. Remember the Betamax vs. VHS war? Technical merit had no meaning. The people supporting VHS undersold Sony and took them right out of the game. If it works 'good enough' and is cheaper, that format is the winner.

Perfection is a nice goal, but money drives the marketplace.

Wars???

[PingPongBoy]

Haven't we enough of this nonsense? I just recently bought a DVD+-RW. Give me a break. It ends up burning both types. I've been told by one source that DVD+R is more compatible with most drives - no real way to substantiate this personally although I have two DVD-ROM drives one that reads the DVD+R and one that doesn't. It's damn frustrating.

Why can't they settle on one format? The resulting drives end up supporting all possible formats. Disks end up being the same price and capacity. Speeds end up converging. Eventually all formats become obsolete - but that doesn't mean it isn't worth coming to an agreement especially when the user just demands support of all formats - well who wouldn't?

Magnavox

[Ruie]

Try cheating and setting a code to indicate that you have plain DVD disc instead of DVD+R - chances are Magnavox will play it just fine.

See Linux DVD+R/W page and search for "Book type".

In my case setting book type to DVD-R for a DVD+R dvd allowed it to play fine in a drive that would not accept plain DVD+R disk.

+ got more support. - got less. Buy + or dual form

[Nailer]

HP: +
Microsoft: +
Dell: +

Compaq: - . Then got brought by HP. Now +.
Sony: - . Now moved to dual burners.
Apple: - . Now moved to dual burners (though IIRC some things still require - disks).

One wonders when RAID / Hard disks...

[blahplusplus]

... won't become a better longterm (and ultimately cheaper and quicker) alternative then backing up enormous amounts of data onto discs who's reliability is increasingly questionable due the easy at which the data can be made unreadable. The amount of data is exploding but not the speed at which we are backing it up.

In my opinion DVD burners have very few uses: Burning backups of critical data, warez, movies and music. Also the problem with CDR/DVDR-Rot will most likely rear its ugly head. I have cd's less then 2-3 years old that can no longer be read in its entirety theres always some file or portion of the disc (no matter how small) that becomes unreadable over the years. While CD's or DVD's that I've actually purchased last nearly forever if taken good care of. If the quality of burnable media does not get more reliable I can easily see hard drives RAID/internet backup solutions taking their place.

Re:Too late to matter

[strider_starslayer]

no it dosen't.

It means that as people phase out there old players, they will be updating (mostly seamlessly) to blu-ray, there old disks will still play in the new blu-ray player, and now they'll be able to play these newfangeled 'high definition' DVDs: Couse that won't mean jack to them, except that blockbuster will have a small shelf of them, that will get progressivly bigger as the years go on until it completely replaces DVD (it's rather difficult to find a VHS in a blockbuster for basically that reason, except that a blu-ray has the ADDED advantage of being backwards compatible)