We saw two different examples of the IBM T221 (equivalent) at SIGGRAPH last year, driven by FireGLs and by a special Matrox card of some kind, IIRC.
We oohed & aahed at the wonderful clarity of the picture. We marvelled at the sheer detail that 200dpi can give you. We were awed at the expansive
range of the viewing angle. We were even impressed by the quantity of zeroes on the price tag. Then we saw the picture change.
It does not update fast. In fact, one system took nearly a third of a second to draw the next picture, and the other took closer to two-thirds of a second. Worse, they updated in quadrants or vertical strips, and the effect was quite jarring. This is not a monitor you could use for animation.
An AC posted elsewhere here that they can get up to 20 Hz updates. If so, that's a huge improvement over what I saw, but it still sucks big time for most usage.
Because most of those DVD players can only play MP3s on a CD-R - they don't even check for MP3s if it's a DVD.
Also because if it's in AC-3, it works in any DVD player, not just some.
And finally, because then I can give it my own navigation system, album art etc, rather than relying on the DVD player's navigator (which, on an Apex AD-600, is pretty bad).
Not only can you burn surround AC-3 or DTS audio onto a standard CD-R, you may not even need a DVD player to play it back:-)
If you have a CD player with a digital output, and that is connected to a surround-decoding amplifier, chances are that'll play it back just fine. I burned a CD with various bitrate AC-3 tracks mixed with DTS tracks (CD-Text too), and stuck it in my 300-disc Sony CD jukebox. The signal was piped into my Yamaha surround receiver, and played it back perfectly - even scrolled the filenames by on the CD player's display. Very cool, listening to surround sound from a standard CD player.
That got me thinking - perhaps I could encode all my CDs down to 192 Kbps 2-channel AC-3 files, and squeeze much more music onto each CD. Load up the jukebox & get 7 weeks of uninterrupted audio...
'Cept it didn't work, of course - in order to play back on a standard CD player, the compressed AC-3 file has to be padded out to ordinary redbook audio rates - it takes the same amount of disc space. Still only ~80 minutes of audio, regardless of encoding.
Never mind - I'll encode my whole MP3 collection into AC-3 files, then burn a standard DVD (with still images & a lot of music) on my nifty DVD+RW drive. I can still fit many hundreds of hours on a single disc that way. Too bad I don't have a jukebox DVD player...
And, of course, I can still rip my Luc Besson - Atlantis DVD's soundtrack onto a DTS surround CD, and replace the humble 2-channel CD soundtrack I have in the jukebox with full 5.1 audio:-)
Quite true, except that you can't play a DVD-RAM disc in your DVD-Video player, at least for 99.99% of current players. And that's the #1 use for DVD burning. It's equally incompatible with almost all DVD-ROM drives.
DVD-RAM makes for excellent jukebox archivers though.
I really liked Half-Life. I played a few other things, but the only game I've enjoyed as much since was Halo.
I've played Halo through a number of times, at different difficulty levels - Legendary has a slightly different ending, and Easy gives more opportunities for driving tanks & flying Banshees - both as a single player and cooperative with a friend. Multiplayer kicks ass too. Played it quite a bit more than Half-Life, in fact.
If you have access to an Xbox I can definitely recommend checking it out - or wait till the PC version finally arrives.
Except they're not really in competition to each other.
- Cg is a high-level shading language (compatible with DirectX 9's HLSL) that will compile to both DirectX and OpenGL APIs, or to various sets of OpenGL extensions, even at runtime if desired.
- Render Monkey is an IDE that supports various shading languages, including Microsoft's (and therefore Cg, at least when they add DX9 support). AFAIK, it's not that dissimilar to nVidia's own Effects Browser.
- OpenGL 2.0 is a lot more than just a shading language, but in any case, it's still at the proposal stage. Cg may yet be adopted for the language, but it will likely end up being quite similar at least.
So I see no reason why you couldn't write your shaders in Cg (sorry, DX9 HLSL) within the RenderMonkey environment, and then compile your results to OpenGL 2.0.
nVidia have said they'll support whatever the ARB decides, but even if OpenGL 2.0 does use the 3DLabs language, there's no particular reason you couldn't use a Cg profile to output an OpenGL 2.0 HL shader, or an ARB_vertex_program shader, or something even lower-level.
Hell, why not just write your shaders in RenderMan & then use RenderMonkey or Effects Browser or whatever to import the RIBs & compile that down. Ever wondered why nVidia bought Exluna? There's a lot of RenderMan expertise right there...
Don't forget that Cg and DirectX 9's shader language are one and the same. It's not just nVidia that designed the language.
If you're going to write a shader for a DirectX game, you might as well run it through the Cg compiler & get a version for OpenGL 1.4 too. The beta 2 version nVidia released recently adds support for ARB_vertex_program as well as NV30-specific profiles.
Better still, if you choose the run-time compile option, you can get your high-level shader compiled & optimised for whatever supported hardware or API version is present - which means NV30-specific support if it's there, or a fallback to ARB if it isn't.
And if ATI play along with their own profile, you could automatically get compiled code that takes advantage of Radeon 9700-specific features too.
OK, some facts for the melting pot, even if a little late.
I wrote a benchmark last night that did DirectDraw and OpenGL pixelblock transfers, both
ways across the AGP bus. Now, I wouldn't call my results totally rigorous (there are various versions of drivers, no Win9x machines, a couple WinXP & the rest are Win2k), but I ran many of them multiple times, on a selection of machines/cards, & got pretty consistent numbers each time. Also, the DirectDraw readback numbers agreed fairly closely with the Studio Magic Direct3D results.
(Write denotes system to gfx card, Read denotes gfx card to system)
- OpenGL does WAY faster readbacks, especially on nVidia hardware.
- OpenGL is faster for writes too, on nVidia, but a lot slower on ATI
- ATI seem to optimise more for DirectX
- The SGI's unified memory architecture does help, though not as much as I would have expected.
- Matrox's OpenGL drivers sucked big time.
- These numbers would look better in one of Damage's graphs.
Anyway, I'm convinced that there's no particular hardware problems involved, other than perhaps readback being limited to PCI66 speeds. I have no idea why DirectX readbacks are so much slower - can it really be that every single company just hasn't bothered to optimise this path, even though they have for OpenGL? Or is there something within DirectX itself that's holding them all back?
If you want to do high-end video rendering things, perhaps a gaming card isn't the best choice.
Why is it that a much more expensive Quadro card gives equally slow results? I've run a very similar test on an SGI 320 (shared-memory design) and it only gives 18.9 MB/s.
Anyone reading this with a Wildcat 6000-series? What does that bench at?
If it were just a driver bug or even a design tradeoff, why is it that all GPUs from any manufacturer are uniformly abysmal? Even an SGI 320 with its UMA design still only gives 18.9 MB/s readback speeds, to my tests.
I asked nVidia at SIGGRAPH why image readback is so slow. They said, no motherboard they know of (not even their own) supports AGP Writes back to the system memory. Without that, you're limited to PCI bandwidth at best, far less than what the AGP spec allows.
However, we're not even seeing that. Results are showing 1% of what is possible. It's certainly a hardware issue, but there may be a lot of room to improve from the software side, too.
The AMD partisans hold out hope for the K8, generally forgetting that the K8 is a K7 with a 64-bit bag on the side.
You make some telling points. Your history is accurate, and your predictions for the K8 are cogent, and stand a fair chance of coming true. However...
When Intel designed the P4's core, they went down one of the possible optimisation paths, that of lengthening the pipeline to improve clock speed scalability. It's certainly working, and now that Intel have got their RDRAM vs. DDR position sorted out, their future looks a lot brighter than it did 12 months ago. But there are other valid approaches too.
AMD have chosen another way, that of settling for the more modest MHz gains of process shrinks and focussing on improved IPC instead, mostly by attacking the memory bottleneck. The K8's drastically lowered memory access latency is due to its onboard memory controller, and that gives a very nice bump to your effective IPC. The P4, OTOH, while having bandwidth aplenty, will see greater restrictions as its clock speed scales from the increased latencies of its memory design.
As for bandwidth, the Sledgehammer's dual DDR design keeps it fed too, and better, it scales as you add CPUs thanks to the NUMA design. The P4/Xeon (and Itanium) multi-CPU architectures are limited by its traditional shared-bus approach. Maybe my perceptions are off (as I deal almost exclusively with multi-CPU workstations each day), but it may turn out that this is a greater limiting factor for Intel in the longer run.
And then there's the Itanium - still a shared-bus design (though now with Even More Bandwidth), but with a strange new ISA that puts the optimisation load on the compiler instead - and almost completely breaks with existing code. A clever design? Only if they can make it work acceptably before x86-64 gets too entrenched. Remember how Windows beat out OS/2? Backwards compatibility is often more important than a fancy new design. AMD have learnt that lesson.
Time will tell, of course. Both companies have chosen sensible but different approaches. It may just come down to marketing or staying power, and Intel do have the edge there.
Incompatible how? I've seen people selling dual Athlon systems with DVD+RW drives installed, so I assume they do work.
But I've also heard of issues with setting the drive to do DMA transfers on those systems. It would only operate in PIO 4 mode. Functional, but less than ideal.
I really hope they can get some of these issues worked out quickly before the Hammer arrives..
Can't deny that. But for $3 more, my DVD+RW disc is burnt 2.4x faster than your DVD-RW - 40 mins to your hour and a half. Perhaps you should stop wasting your time...
All *2nd-generation* DVD+RW drives will write to DVD+R discs, and AFAIK all current DVD-RW drives will write to DVD-R discs too. Note that 1st-gen DVD+RW drives (e.g. HP 100i) will not write to DVD+R discs.
Neither standard will write to the other's media, of course. However, both standards will happily read each other's media.
Now all DVD+R has to deal with is overpriced burners and expensive media
It's true they are a little more expensive - though I've seen 2nd-gen Ricoh drives for $284 on pricewatch, and DVD+R discs for under $3 from www.shop4tech.com. I wouldn't really call that overpriced.
But frankly, I'm happy to pay a little extra. The DVD+R/RW drives are simply superior. I couldn't bear to wait an hour and a half to burn a rewritable disc - but that's what you're stuck with if you buy a DVR-A04. My 200i will do it in under 40 minutes, and the next-gen DVD+R drives will do it in under 25. Add that to the other advantages, and I'm a happy camper:-)
DVD+RW is just as compatible as DVD-RW, which is to say, compatible with supposedly 70% of players out there.
However, DVD+R is just as compatible with DVD-R, i.e. with nearly 100% of players.
Both rewritable formats suffer from lower compatibility because older players are confused by the media's lower reflectivity into thinking it's a dual layer disc.
However, both write-once formats use a normal-reflectivity media, and both are more or less equally compatible. In fact, DVD+R has the theoretical edge due to its lossless linking method of writing, which is more like printed DVD-Video discs.
The answer is simply, don't buy a 1st-gen DVD+RW drive since they couldn't write DVD+R discs. However, the 2nd-gen drives (HP 200i, Ricoh 5125 etc) do burn write-once DVD+R discs, and are at least as compatible as DVD-R as this list shows.
I'm getting very tired of all the misinformation and FUD floating about this issue, and I'm starting to wonder who's behind it all...
I also bought a DVD+R drive (after waiting to be sure that it would actually write DVD+R discs!). Though DVD-R discs are a little cheaper from online stores (strangely, they're actually more expensive than DVD+R where I tend to shop), I've been quite gratified by how fast the prices have been dropping. $3/disc is quite acceptable, IMHO, at least for the time being.
I can't say I regret buying my drive. In fact, I tend to use it with a feeling bordering on smugness whenever I burn a rewritable disc 2.4 times faster than the DVR-A04:-)
We use DVD-R General discs because they are cheap and allow us multiple tries without toasting a $25 disc and then find an error.
What kind of disc costs $25?
I do my test burns on a $7 DVD+RW disc, then when I like it I burn it to a $3 DVD+R disc. I dunno where you're buying your media from, but I think they're trying to rip you off.
DVD-R is the only "true" recordable DVD standard, since it was created by the DVD Consortium
It's actually called the DVD Forum, but so what? The same people tried to tell us that DVD-RAM discs were DVDs too - try playing one of those discs (or cartridges!) in your player and see how far you get. Clearly, the support of the DVD Forum doesn't count for much as far as compatibility goes. In my books, the greater industry weight on the side of the DVD Alliance counts for more.
It's true that the rollout of the 1st-gen DVD+RW drives was a joke. Thankfully, Philips and other manufactures did stand by their customers & offered refunds & exchanges - the notable exception was HP, who were eventually pressured into offering a paid "upgrade" to the 2nd-gen drives after much consumer backlash.
As for DVD+RW home entertainment devices, I count 8 different models on this list. They've been available for some time.
There's an awful lot of FUD surrounding the DVD+R/RW format, but why? It's just as compatible (2nd-gen drives at least), it's faster, it's more flexible, and it's almost the same price. I've seen more misinformation in this slashdot article than I have in the past 3 months of slashdot put together, which is saying something. Is someone spreading this doubt deliberately?
DVD-R is a little cheaper due to an earlier introduction and greater scale, but prices of DVD+R are actually fairly close - I've seen $284 for 2nd-gen drives, and $3/disc. I'm sure a little more digging would find something even cheaper.
I don't know why people keep accusing DVD+R of poor compatibility. The fact is, write-once discs of each standard are readable in close to 100% of drives & players, while rewritable discs of each standard are both less compatible. See here for a list.
The older 1st-gen DVD+RW drives that could not burn write-once discs did suffer, since rewritable formats of each type are inherently less compatible, but since 2nd-gen drives became available that could write DVD+R discs, they've been pretty much identical.
As for advantages, how about DVD+R/RW drives just burn discs faster? Especially rewritable discs. They also allow you to append video to a disc without having to reformat & rewrite the lot. There are other advantages too.
Actually, I use my HP dvd200i DVD+R/RW drive for both of those things too. It works very well at each.
What's more, it burns discs faster (especially rewritable discs), it's just as compatible, and I've seen drives (the Ricoh 5125A - 2nd gen DVD+R/RW, the drive OEM'd to other vendors) on Pricewatch for as low as US$284.
DVD-R is the officially supported standard of the DVD Forum.
So? DVD+R is the officially supported standard of the DVD Alliance. They use a different logo, but IMHO the DVD Alliance members (HP, Phillips, Ricoh, Sony, Mitsubishi, Dell, Thomson, Yamaha, Verbatim etc) have at least as much industry clout. Certainly the approval of the DVD Forum means nothing as far as compatibility goes, or they wouldn't be putting the "offical" DVD logo on DVD-RAM drives (try reading a DVD-RAM disc [or cartrige!] in your home player sometime).
I just ordered a DVR-A04 for $299 I've seen the OEM for $249.
I've seen DVD+R discs for $3 from Meritline, and the Ricoh 5125A DVD+R/RW drive for $284 from Elegantshopping.com.
DVD-R discs are cheaper, true, since they have a year or two head start in scale, but the + discs have been dropping extremely fast considering they've only been on the market since April. Same with the drives. They are rapidly reaching price parity.
I myself paid more than that for my HP dvd200i 4 months ago (though it was the same price as the DVR-A04 at the place I bought it), and I've been very happy with it too. I would have been willing to pay a premium, since the 200i burned discs faster (more than twice as fast, in the case of rewritable discs) and it allows me to append video without having to reformat & rewrite the lot. There are other advantages too.
The reality is, DVD-R got there first and has had time to build a good-sized market base, but DVD+R is a better standard - equally compatible yet more flexible - and has been rapidly catching up in terms of price. I put my money on DVD+R and haven't regretted it since.
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We oohed & aahed at the wonderful clarity of the picture. We marvelled at the sheer detail that 200dpi can give you. We were awed at the expansive range of the viewing angle. We were even impressed by the quantity of zeroes on the price tag. Then we saw the picture change.
It does not update fast. In fact, one system took nearly a third of a second to draw the next picture, and the other took closer to two-thirds of a second. Worse, they updated in quadrants or vertical strips, and the effect was quite jarring. This is not a monitor you could use for animation.
An AC posted elsewhere here that they can get up to 20 Hz updates. If so, that's a huge improvement over what I saw, but it still sucks big time for most usage.
Been looking for years - I knew there used to be a Region 2 disc ages back, but I never could find one for sale. Then they went & re-released it :-)
Also because if it's in AC-3, it works in any DVD player, not just some.
And finally, because then I can give it my own navigation system, album art etc, rather than relying on the DVD player's navigator (which, on an Apex AD-600, is pretty bad).
If you have a CD player with a digital output, and that is connected to a surround-decoding amplifier, chances are that'll play it back just fine. I burned a CD with various bitrate AC-3 tracks mixed with DTS tracks (CD-Text too), and stuck it in my 300-disc Sony CD jukebox. The signal was piped into my Yamaha surround receiver, and played it back perfectly - even scrolled the filenames by on the CD player's display. Very cool, listening to surround sound from a standard CD player.
That got me thinking - perhaps I could encode all my CDs down to 192 Kbps 2-channel AC-3 files, and squeeze much more music onto each CD. Load up the jukebox & get 7 weeks of uninterrupted audio...
'Cept it didn't work, of course - in order to play back on a standard CD player, the compressed AC-3 file has to be padded out to ordinary redbook audio rates - it takes the same amount of disc space. Still only ~80 minutes of audio, regardless of encoding.
Never mind - I'll encode my whole MP3 collection into AC-3 files, then burn a standard DVD (with still images & a lot of music) on my nifty DVD+RW drive. I can still fit many hundreds of hours on a single disc that way. Too bad I don't have a jukebox DVD player...
And, of course, I can still rip my Luc Besson - Atlantis DVD's soundtrack onto a DTS surround CD, and replace the humble 2-channel CD soundtrack I have in the jukebox with full 5.1 audio
DVD-RAM makes for excellent jukebox archivers though.
I've played Halo through a number of times, at different difficulty levels - Legendary has a slightly different ending, and Easy gives more opportunities for driving tanks & flying Banshees - both as a single player and cooperative with a friend. Multiplayer kicks ass too. Played it quite a bit more than Half-Life, in fact.
If you have access to an Xbox I can definitely recommend checking it out - or wait till the PC version finally arrives.
- Cg is a high-level shading language (compatible with DirectX 9's HLSL) that will compile to both DirectX and OpenGL APIs, or to various sets of OpenGL extensions, even at runtime if desired.
- Render Monkey is an IDE that supports various shading languages, including Microsoft's (and therefore Cg, at least when they add DX9 support). AFAIK, it's not that dissimilar to nVidia's own Effects Browser.
- OpenGL 2.0 is a lot more than just a shading language, but in any case, it's still at the proposal stage. Cg may yet be adopted for the language, but it will likely end up being quite similar at least.
So I see no reason why you couldn't write your shaders in Cg (sorry, DX9 HLSL) within the RenderMonkey environment, and then compile your results to OpenGL 2.0.
nVidia have said they'll support whatever the ARB decides, but even if OpenGL 2.0 does use the 3DLabs language, there's no particular reason you couldn't use a Cg profile to output an OpenGL 2.0 HL shader, or an ARB_vertex_program shader, or something even lower-level.
Hell, why not just write your shaders in RenderMan & then use RenderMonkey or Effects Browser or whatever to import the RIBs & compile that down. Ever wondered why nVidia bought Exluna? There's a lot of RenderMan expertise right there...
If you're going to write a shader for a DirectX game, you might as well run it through the Cg compiler & get a version for OpenGL 1.4 too. The beta 2 version nVidia released recently adds support for ARB_vertex_program as well as NV30-specific profiles.
Better still, if you choose the run-time compile option, you can get your high-level shader compiled & optimised for whatever supported hardware or API version is present - which means NV30-specific support if it's there, or a fallback to ARB if it isn't.
And if ATI play along with their own profile, you could automatically get compiled code that takes advantage of Radeon 9700-specific features too.
I wrote a benchmark last night that did DirectDraw and OpenGL pixelblock transfers, both ways across the AGP bus. Now, I wouldn't call my results totally rigorous (there are various versions of drivers, no Win9x machines, a couple WinXP & the rest are Win2k), but I ran many of them multiple times, on a selection of machines/cards, & got pretty consistent numbers each time. Also, the DirectDraw readback numbers agreed fairly closely with the Studio Magic Direct3D results.
(Write denotes system to gfx card, Read denotes gfx card to system)
A few things struck me:- OpenGL does WAY faster readbacks, especially on nVidia hardware.
- OpenGL is faster for writes too, on nVidia, but a lot slower on ATI
- ATI seem to optimise more for DirectX
- The SGI's unified memory architecture does help, though not as much as I would have expected.
- Matrox's OpenGL drivers sucked big time.
- These numbers would look better in one of Damage's graphs.
Anyway, I'm convinced that there's no particular hardware problems involved, other than perhaps readback being limited to PCI66 speeds. I have no idea why DirectX readbacks are so much slower - can it really be that every single company just hasn't bothered to optimise this path, even though they have for OpenGL? Or is there something within DirectX itself that's holding them all back?
Why is it that a much more expensive Quadro card gives equally slow results? I've run a very similar test on an SGI 320 (shared-memory design) and it only gives 18.9 MB/s.
Anyone reading this with a Wildcat 6000-series? What does that bench at?
I asked nVidia at SIGGRAPH why image readback is so slow. They said, no motherboard they know of (not even their own) supports AGP Writes back to the system memory. Without that, you're limited to PCI bandwidth at best, far less than what the AGP spec allows.
However, we're not even seeing that. Results are showing 1% of what is possible. It's certainly a hardware issue, but there may be a lot of room to improve from the software side, too.
You make some telling points. Your history is accurate, and your predictions for the K8 are cogent, and stand a fair chance of coming true. However...
When Intel designed the P4's core, they went down one of the possible optimisation paths, that of lengthening the pipeline to improve clock speed scalability. It's certainly working, and now that Intel have got their RDRAM vs. DDR position sorted out, their future looks a lot brighter than it did 12 months ago. But there are other valid approaches too.
AMD have chosen another way, that of settling for the more modest MHz gains of process shrinks and focussing on improved IPC instead, mostly by attacking the memory bottleneck. The K8's drastically lowered memory access latency is due to its onboard memory controller, and that gives a very nice bump to your effective IPC. The P4, OTOH, while having bandwidth aplenty, will see greater restrictions as its clock speed scales from the increased latencies of its memory design.
As for bandwidth, the Sledgehammer's dual DDR design keeps it fed too, and better, it scales as you add CPUs thanks to the NUMA design. The P4/Xeon (and Itanium) multi-CPU architectures are limited by its traditional shared-bus approach. Maybe my perceptions are off (as I deal almost exclusively with multi-CPU workstations each day), but it may turn out that this is a greater limiting factor for Intel in the longer run.
And then there's the Itanium - still a shared-bus design (though now with Even More Bandwidth), but with a strange new ISA that puts the optimisation load on the compiler instead - and almost completely breaks with existing code. A clever design? Only if they can make it work acceptably before x86-64 gets too entrenched. Remember how Windows beat out OS/2? Backwards compatibility is often more important than a fancy new design. AMD have learnt that lesson.
Time will tell, of course. Both companies have chosen sensible but different approaches. It may just come down to marketing or staying power, and Intel do have the edge there.
But I've also heard of issues with setting the drive to do DMA transfers on those systems. It would only operate in PIO 4 mode. Functional, but less than ideal.
I really hope they can get some of these issues worked out quickly before the Hammer arrives..
Can't deny that. But for $3 more, my DVD+RW disc is burnt 2.4x faster than your DVD-RW - 40 mins to your hour and a half. Perhaps you should stop wasting your time...
Neither standard will write to the other's media, of course. However, both standards will happily read each other's media.
I've seen DVD+R discs in numerous places for under $3. I think you're looking in the wrong places.
I've also seen DVD+R discs for under $3, and DVD+RW discs for under $5. Can't complain about that.
It's true they are a little more expensive - though I've seen 2nd-gen Ricoh drives for $284 on pricewatch, and DVD+R discs for under $3 from www.shop4tech.com. I wouldn't really call that overpriced.
But frankly, I'm happy to pay a little extra. The DVD+R/RW drives are simply superior. I couldn't bear to wait an hour and a half to burn a rewritable disc - but that's what you're stuck with if you buy a DVR-A04. My 200i will do it in under 40 minutes, and the next-gen DVD+R drives will do it in under 25. Add that to the other advantages, and I'm a happy camper :-)
However, DVD+R is just as compatible with DVD-R, i.e. with nearly 100% of players.
Both rewritable formats suffer from lower compatibility because older players are confused by the media's lower reflectivity into thinking it's a dual layer disc.
However, both write-once formats use a normal-reflectivity media, and both are more or less equally compatible. In fact, DVD+R has the theoretical edge due to its lossless linking method of writing, which is more like printed DVD-Video discs.
The answer is simply, don't buy a 1st-gen DVD+RW drive since they couldn't write DVD+R discs. However, the 2nd-gen drives (HP 200i, Ricoh 5125 etc) do burn write-once DVD+R discs, and are at least as compatible as DVD-R as this list shows.
I'm getting very tired of all the misinformation and FUD floating about this issue, and I'm starting to wonder who's behind it all...
I can't say I regret buying my drive. In fact, I tend to use it with a feeling bordering on smugness whenever I burn a rewritable disc 2.4 times faster than the DVR-A04 :-)
What kind of disc costs $25?
I do my test burns on a $7 DVD+RW disc, then when I like it I burn it to a $3 DVD+R disc. I dunno where you're buying your media from, but I think they're trying to rip you off.
It's actually called the DVD Forum, but so what? The same people tried to tell us that DVD-RAM discs were DVDs too - try playing one of those discs (or cartridges!) in your player and see how far you get. Clearly, the support of the DVD Forum doesn't count for much as far as compatibility goes. In my books, the greater industry weight on the side of the DVD Alliance counts for more.
It's true that the rollout of the 1st-gen DVD+RW drives was a joke. Thankfully, Philips and other manufactures did stand by their customers & offered refunds & exchanges - the notable exception was HP, who were eventually pressured into offering a paid "upgrade" to the 2nd-gen drives after much consumer backlash.
As for DVD+RW home entertainment devices, I count 8 different models on this list. They've been available for some time.
There's an awful lot of FUD surrounding the DVD+R/RW format, but why? It's just as compatible (2nd-gen drives at least), it's faster, it's more flexible, and it's almost the same price. I've seen more misinformation in this slashdot article than I have in the past 3 months of slashdot put together, which is saying something. Is someone spreading this doubt deliberately?
I don't know why people keep accusing DVD+R of poor compatibility. The fact is, write-once discs of each standard are readable in close to 100% of drives & players, while rewritable discs of each standard are both less compatible. See here for a list.
The older 1st-gen DVD+RW drives that could not burn write-once discs did suffer, since rewritable formats of each type are inherently less compatible, but since 2nd-gen drives became available that could write DVD+R discs, they've been pretty much identical.
As for advantages, how about DVD+R/RW drives just burn discs faster? Especially rewritable discs. They also allow you to append video to a disc without having to reformat & rewrite the lot. There are other advantages too.
What's more, it burns discs faster (especially rewritable discs), it's just as compatible, and I've seen drives (the Ricoh 5125A - 2nd gen DVD+R/RW, the drive OEM'd to other vendors) on Pricewatch for as low as US$284.
So? DVD+R is the officially supported standard of the DVD Alliance. They use a different logo, but IMHO the DVD Alliance members (HP, Phillips, Ricoh, Sony, Mitsubishi, Dell, Thomson, Yamaha, Verbatim etc) have at least as much industry clout. Certainly the approval of the DVD Forum means nothing as far as compatibility goes, or they wouldn't be putting the "offical" DVD logo on DVD-RAM drives (try reading a DVD-RAM disc [or cartrige!] in your home player sometime).
I just ordered a DVR-A04 for $299 I've seen the OEM for $249.
I've seen DVD+R discs for $3 from Meritline, and the Ricoh 5125A DVD+R/RW drive for $284 from Elegantshopping.com.
DVD-R discs are cheaper, true, since they have a year or two head start in scale, but the + discs have been dropping extremely fast considering they've only been on the market since April. Same with the drives. They are rapidly reaching price parity.
I myself paid more than that for my HP dvd200i 4 months ago (though it was the same price as the DVR-A04 at the place I bought it), and I've been very happy with it too. I would have been willing to pay a premium, since the 200i burned discs faster (more than twice as fast, in the case of rewritable discs) and it allows me to append video without having to reformat & rewrite the lot. There are other advantages too.
The reality is, DVD-R got there first and has had time to build a good-sized market base, but DVD+R is a better standard - equally compatible yet more flexible - and has been rapidly catching up in terms of price. I put my money on DVD+R and haven't regretted it since.