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DVD Burner Comparison
mikemuch writes "While you're waiting for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, you may want to check out ExtremeTech's roundup of dual-layer DVD burners. Starting at about $43US, some of them are quite powerful, come with nice bundled software, and are pretty good deals, to boot."
Do not pass go; go directly to the summary page:
Final Thoughts: What to buy
640YB ought to be enough for anybody.
One area the article completely ignores is the quality of the burns? They don't mention if they had any troubles playing back anything that was burned on these drives. Compatibility with existing dvd players is a big deal and it would have been nice to see some mention of this in the test. Having the ability to burn a dvd that only half of my friends/family can play twice as fast (or half the cost) is useless.
Why do these kinds of reviews always focus on speed alone? Who cares if it takes a couple of minutes longer to burn a DVD with one drive versus another? It's not like you have to sit there with baited breath as the DVD burns -- you can do other things.
I'd rather see a comparison of noise or rate-of-coaster-production. I recently got a new DVD burner which works rather well as far as speed and reliability, but is way too noisy, even when I'm just playing a DVD with it. I have to use my old DVD-ROM drive for playback.
I guess its harder to test those things, though. You can't just load up some benchmark it let it run.
And still no comments on whether or not the Linux support will be alright. Whether the burner is good or not doesnt matter to me until I know I can run it at home. Am I the only Linux user concerned? Considering Im posting on /., and other /.ers are reading, I imagine not. But I could have missed some major article or something concerning it. Would somebody shed some light for me?
Besides being the least expensive choice in the review, it's also the only model of the four which is supported by K-Probe.
? CategoryId=1
http://www.cdrlabs.com/kprobe/
or
http://www.k-probe.com/
And if you actually care about burners, read the reviews from a quality site that actually reviews virtually all the models, does far more exhaustive tests, and has a very active technical forum. CDR Info.
http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Reviews/Home.aspx
"Starting at about $43US, some of them are [...] pretty good deals, to boot."
I can't speak for other users, but I don't boot from CD enough for booting performance to factor in at all when selecting optical drives. This guy has gotta be some die-hard Windows Me enthusiast.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Overpriced media, really. Just use a sharpie.
Although the price of Dual Layer (DL) media has come down, it's still $2 - $4 a disk, vs $0.50 - $1.00 for comparable Single Layer disks. So, although you do need two disks, burning information to a single layer disk is still cheaper, about twice as much. I bought a DL burner quite awhile ago, but I'm still waiting for good news regarding media. IMHO, until the media comes down, Dual Layer just doesn't cut it.
I don't know much about VHS-DVD burners (didn't know they even existed), but you might want to look into just doing it with a capture card and a PC. I don't know if I'd trust a dedicated device -- it might not do quite what you're looking for and it probably won't have the flexibility to adjust.
As for the compression question, I don't think you can do that with any decent quality. Assuming you're using single-layer (4.4GB) discs (double-layer ones are still pretty expensive, especially if you going to be backing up large amounts of video), you could probably fit about four hours on it at decent quality if you had decent source. Since you're going from low quality VHS, your source quality is to have a lot of analog (static) degradation. MPEG compression tends to work poorly with anolog degraded sources. You'll end up with severely blocky image.
I have a MythTV system and if I go below 2 GB/hour with MPEG2 compression it starts to look pretty lousy (I have it set to 3 GB/hour). This is with capturing directly from analog cable (of pretty decent quality). Not the best source, but a lot better than SLP VHS.
I'm not sure how much you'll be able to fit comfortably on a DVD, but I'd guess about 1.5 to 2 hours given your low quality source. If playback on a DVD player isn't an issue, you might want to look into just making a DVD of MPEG4 encoded files. That should double your capacity.
I've been using HP DVD burners (both single and dual layer) for quite some time. I've found that they perform very well on Windows, OS X, and Linux. I've had some trouble with the Lite-On drives but the HP units have never failed to perform. I know that Plextor is supposed to be the best CD/DVD drive maker, but I'm really not interested in paying their asking price.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
NEC? Sony?
a =143191,00.asp
I have owned both and NEC makes a very nice dual layer burner for the price and is very popular. Why not include it in the comparison? (While we are at it, how about Ben-Q? Their prices are rock bottom but I always wondered if the quality was as well...)
Their previous article linked on the first page had a Sony drive but no NEC.
http://www.extremetech.com/print_article2/0,1217,
I'd also like to see a site reviewing the quality of media for CD-R and DVD-R. The thing I care about is not speed, but reliability. And the Media may affect that more than the burner itself. There's a wide variety of prices on media but nothing to really guide you on quality and longevity.
Over the long run the cost of the burner may be small compared to the cost of the media, so there's no big reason to scrimp on the burner price. But there's a big reason to scrimp on the media. Plus of course unreliable media may lose very valuable data. So it's important to understand reliability of media.
I can't find any discussions of this that are not terribly outdated. It seems like every manufarcturer is constantly changing media names and makes several different lines. (e.g. look at Ritek). But on-line stores don't offer enough information to discern what might make one better than the other. (e.g. info on dyes, or disk construction).
Anyone have some reasonably fresh or comprehensive discussions of this. Or list the names of DVD or CD-r you had reliability problems with. Were the problems Batch-like (e.g. if one CD in the cake-box was bad were many of them bad) or random?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Pioneer DVR-111D
Great IDE Dual-Layer burner, Mac compatible (works with Toast out-of-the-box, I used Patchburn to make it "Apple Supported/Shipped"), apparently Linux compatible, and dirt cheap ($35.99).
Kicks ass, no coasters, does just about every format. 'nuff said.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Indeed, the first thing I noticed was the lack of NEC's burners. I recently put an ND-3550A into a new system I built, and it's first-rate. It'll burn single-layer DVD+R or -R at 16x if you have suitable media, and DL +R discs at 8x.
Even better - you can get one for about $40.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Having done exactly what the parent was talking about, I can advise against using a capture card. I tried a Hauppauge 150 and an ATI TV Wonder Elite and couldn't get the colors to come out well at all. The image was also a lot softer that I would have liked. I borrowed a VHS->DVD unit from a friend (I'm sorry, this was 6 months ago, I don't remember the brand off-hand) and the results were far better than what my PC pulled off.
I would concur with this.
I have a Toshiba DVD Recorder/VCR (Techincal term for standalones is "Recorder" not "Burner" which refers to the Drive) and it works well enough, but doesn't work to archive my commercial tapes (my intention is to convert them to DVD for archival purposes and into a format that lets my 6 year old play them on his PC without messing with the tapes) - this is due to Macrovision.
HOWEVER - some products, like KWorld's capture cards, ignore Macrovision, so you can perform the conversion to MPEG2 and then quickly author a DVD from that.
Well, that's nice. Too bad only one of those in signficant in the Optical drive mass market - Lite-On. HP drives are going to pretty much be in HP systems. Plextor offers the most expensive drives around and they're just not that interesting to people.
Maybe they should have included Sony, ToshibaSamsung, NEC, or some other companies that actually sell a shitload of drives on the retail market. Lite-On was a good call, though.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
i just got a panasonic dmr-es40v off ebay for around $185 (including shipping) brand new. it was rated 7 out of 10 on zdnet and also pretty well on a slew of other customer rating guides i've read. the only drawback is the inability to create chapter stops. doesn't matter to me as i'll be using it primarily for converting vhs->dvd. if i want chapter stops, i'll use my computer. i've been researching them for a few months now and for the money, this one looks like a good buy.
http://reviews-zdnet.com.com/Panasonic_DMR_ES40V/4 505-6505_16-31570865.html?tag=pdtl
When you recognize love in another and realize how precious it is, everything else seems so insignificant.
I mean, how the hell can you take this thing seriously when on the second page it greets you with:
Wow, seriously, wow, thanks ExtremeTech for remembering us that these 5.25" devices use the same standard 5.25" form factor that's been used since, like, the release of the first CD player for PC, we couldn't have thought about that ourselves !
(and compact? don't make me laugh, anyone who's ever built a PC knows that a standard 5.25" CD/DVD drive is nowhere near compact)
The rest of the article doesn't disappoint of course, with very few (4) devices tested, no word of cross-platform compatibility, on burn reliability (data corruption), on sound measurements and hella crappy diagrams...
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
If you go to CDfreaks you will see people rate Ritek highly. But which Ritek? Ritek makes lots of different versions with highly different prices. You will see that brands like verbatim have different plants with different disks. And some of the allegedly top shelf labels like Plextor don't even make their own disks.
Most manufactureres make both blue and green and sometimes gold CDs. So simply saying buy "Maxell" doesn't really clear up the matter. Furthermore when you scan the forums you mostly see unweighted voting. people vote for the ones they are using but theres no list of the the ones they used and did not like. Comparisons are not metric of put on an even footing.
And when you do see a metric comparison, and you froogle the media model number chances are it's no longer even being made. You can't just assume that one Maxell disk is like another so you can't just use a positive rating of an obsolete model number confers quality to the others.
So no CD freaks really does not clear things up.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Adjusting the speed of your DVD or CD drive is the best way to reduce noise. If you're copying a bunch of data, you probably do want it spinning at max speed, but if you are watching a DVD or something similar (where noise is also usually much more annoying), reducing it works VERY well.
I've been using CD Bremse for years, both for CD and DVD drives, with no problems. YMMV. Word of warning: The site is in German (but the program itself is in English). It's not too hard to figure out the site, though. Click on the CD Bremse link and then the version of the program to download - or click on the "Lauffwerksliste" to get a huge compatibility table.
It's an idiom, at least in US English. It means also.
I'm not currently using Knoppix on DVD, but having much larger capacity than CDROM versions is convenient for some things. CDROM Knoppix has been a save-your-ass part of my repair toolkit for years now, and it's also useful for demos of various things.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Lite-On is supported by K-Probe, yes...but Nero CD/DVD-Speed supports lots of burners. What you're looking for is burn quality. This means a drive/medium combination that works well. Check CD Freaks for loads of test postings.
To give you one data point -- my own experience -- I go with NEC burners and Taiyo Yuden DVD+R media (which I get without problem from Rima). I get good results, whether scanned by the burning drive or a Lite-On I got before I knew better (which only gives mediocre burning results).
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Am I the only person tired of tray loading optical drives? Are we ever going to see slot loading adopted by major manufactures of high quality drives?