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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?"
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.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Buy a drive that supports both formats.
I think you mean the DVD-/+R format war. And, it'll end the same way. We'll all end up with dual format drives.
you vote with your dollars, by refusing to by into either format until the company bigwigs kiss and make up their minds.
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?
...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.
With all of these new recording format options made available to the public, how can any consumer intelligently know which one to buy into?"
If they send me 20 dollars I will tell them the secrets to buying a DVD burner.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
"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.
"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his." - Patton
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.
------
"And may your days be long upon the earth."
Since where are consumers intelligent?
I stick to my millions of unlabled 3 and a half inch floppies.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
Ask my grandma then pick the other. She still swears by Betamax.
Check it out- it's not so hard.
ideally more choice==more competition==lower prices and most drives tend to read/write all the standards
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...
how can any consumer intelligently know which one to buy into?
by being intelligent maybe?
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.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
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.
Blar.
"With all of these new recording format options made available to the public, how can any consumer intelligently know which one to buy into?"
Simple, don't go for compatibility, go with whatever you need ost between speed or capacity.
Optical media are awfull when it comes to compatibility, at this point it is even a lost cause, there are already too much format. Each OS dealing with each format somewhat differently (ex.: session made ISO9660 after a session made HFS won't show in Windows) make the compatibility problem even worse.
For compatibility I go thumbdrive, USB key, however you wanna call them, these are marvelous, they work cross-platform and very well.
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?
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
+R9 has a simple advantage..... This format uses "+" symbol. Naive Consumers think automatic "+ == GOOD". Likewise they assume minus sign, "-", is somehow inferior.
I suggest you read Slashdot
At least, that's what I've found. My drive will do 8X +R's and 4X -R's, but the -R DVD Video tend to play better in older players. This is a concern for me because I help produce DVD's of various productions at the school.
When I need to backup some data however, I reach for the +R pack...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
It's like peanut butter! Crunchy, smooth, extra crunchy, what choices!
(With apologies to Bill Watterson. I would have linked to the appropriate Calvin and Hobbes strip, but I can't find it online. I can't scan it because my scanner and books are packed for moving, and I don't even know where in the books it is.)
Empty PCI slot + Cheap 200GiB Hard Disk = No need for DVD media.
And I'm too lazy to move em to CD-R. *sigh*
Buy a whole bunch of store gift cards for yourself. Hide them in a stack of floppies at more or less regular intervals. Then once you get down to a gift card, you can spend it. Then once you've copied all your floppies, burn them to a CD or DVD.
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.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
The DVD+ format is better because it supports absolute accurate positioning of the sector to be written. DVD- isn't accurate to a single sector.
:(
That means a DVD+RW can be written to without gaps, just like you can write to a floppy or HD with accuracy in the written sector/without gaps.
And this in turn means that only DVD+RW supports Mount Rainier (in the future). Mount Rainier is hardware assisted packet writing:
- The most important thing is that you can use your DVD+MRW (Mount Rainier Rewritable) as a floppy disk/Hard drive. You drag and drop, delete, write something else etc. Just like a storage device is supposed to be used, none of this "burning" crap. MR has extra fault tolerance too.
- Standard OS drivers for all MR drives, they all behave the same.
- Formatting in the background by the firmware, the RW can be written to after about 1 minute, you don't have to wait for the whole DVD to finish formatting to start using it.
Only problem is, there are no fully compliant Mount Rainier DVD+MRW drives yet
The manufacturers are now scampering to get to 16x speed first. After the makers all achieve 16x then we'll get get other differentiating features in the drives, like MR.
The only advantage you get with +RW at the moment is that OTHER packet writing methods (like Nero InCD) also benefit from the exact laser positioning. You don't get Some of the other MRW stuff like background formatting.
I'm waiting with buying a DVD drive until there's an +MRW. You can also recognize compliant drives with the Philips "Easy Write" logo.
P.S. the DVD-R and -RW camp are the ones that do whatever the movie industry wants. The computer manufacturers split from that group because they wanted better features like absolute write-positioning and came up with +RW.
- -- Truth addict for life.
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.
That said, I am frustrated by the constant news about Blu-Ray this and HD-DVD that, with no products available here yet in the US.
There is only one channel of HDTV in my area and not even one I watch. Start pressing HD discs of some sort already! I have had an 8 foot projection (Quad XGA no less) system for three years now, and only current generation DVD (which admittedly looks DAMN good when pumped out of a Radeon 9800) to watch on it. I'm ready for the full Theater experience!
Letter To Iran
Then once you get down to a gift card, you can spend it. ;)
Or you can sort through the whole stack till you found all the gift cards. A slightly more rewarding activity
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
Uhm...many (most?) (all?) of your examples of free and open standards are patented and licensed. Firewire, for example, is patented by Apple, and they charge a license fee to manufacture Firewire chipsets.
Here's a GREAT article on the subject that I found a few months back with a lot of technical details on the differences between the two formats:
http://www.cdfreaks.com/article/113
Interestingly, although a number of people have noted that DVD-R seems to be more "compatible" overall with the majority of readers/players out there, my experience has been that my old ThinkPad 2nd-generation 2x DVD drive (Toshiba) reads DVD+Rs without a lick of trouble, whereas several different DVD-R discs that I've tried in it skip horribly and give me read errors. And this drive was manufactured before either standard was drafted! The especially funny part is that Toshiba was in bed with Pioneer drafting DVD-R (whereas Sony/Philips is the duo that brought us +R) and yet it can't even read the stuff.
-- Nathan
I know /.'ers are expected to comment without RTFA, but crikey, the title of the article includes "R9". That means dual layer, people! (Rounding up the number of gigabytes it will hold -- 4.7 for single layer, 8.5 for dual.) Of the 120-plus postings so far, only a handful address the point.
So far the only dual-layer DVD burners I've seen, and the only dual-layer media I've seen, has been of the +R variety. My Mad Dog Megastor (really a NEC ND-2510A) supports both +R/RW and -R/RW as well as dual-layer +R DL. Of -R DL, the fineprint on the box says "at the time of production, a (-) format Dual Layer standard has not been released".
Format war for +/- R9? I'd say + has won by default, there's no - competition yet.
(As for compatibility, my year-old DVD player plays everything I've thrown at it including 4x +R, 4x -R, 2.4x +RW, 2.4x -RW, and 2.4x +RDL. An older player (several years old) generally recognized the media (one problem with -RW I think) but sometimes had glitchy playback.)
-- Alastair
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.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
CD-Rs for backing up data and CD copies, and TiVo for recording off the TV..I thought about a DVD recorder as a VCR replacement, but the TiVo seems to do that quite adequately..
Currently US prices run about $12 to $15 per disc, although I've seen a new brand at $10. (Single or small quantities.)
As a reference point, this is about 1/3 what blank CD-R media cost at the same stage in its introduction.
It will always cost more than single layer DVD 5, just because the extra manufacturing steps, but it should be in the $1-$2 range in a couple of years.
As for where to buy, google for DVD dual layer media. Best Buy, MicroCenter and Office Depot stock the Verbatim "Solution Kits" (1 DVD+R DL bundled with a bunch of single-layer discs), which is OK if you're going to use the singles anyway, it works out to about $15 for the DL and $15 for the other 9 disks (one of them an RW). Currently you'll have to order on-line if you want just the DL media.
-- Alastair
How on Earth are users supposed to choose between DVD-A and DVDA? It simply baffles me.
The Political Programmer
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?
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
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.
"how can any consumer intelligently know which one to buy into?"
Um, the same way they always have? Diligent research, maybe? I mean, it's just a thought...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
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).
... 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.
The article makes a mistake in presuming there is a speed / capacity choice to be made when buying the burner. In fact all currently available DL drives will write -R/+R at one speed and +R9 at a different, lower speed. For instance the NEC ND-3500 will write -R/+R at 16x, but will only write +R9 at 4x.
how can any consumer intelligently know which one to buy into?
Duh, it's just like every other decision: use the "Eenie, meenie, miney, moe" algorithm.
Same will go for this format. I also have Mac, PC and Linux so give me a tent for all!