Credit where it is due. Macintosh initiated the uniform user interface, and programmers complained bitterly. Windows began to enforce the same rule about a decade later.

#63, but when DVD+R comes out, surely that wont be a problem?

You guys who bought DVD+RW are just pissed off because you can only play your disks in limited players and are trying to justify your stupidy of wasting cash on obsolete items. Go ahead and waste your time replying to this - because you'll soon find out your worthless day is consumed between here and finding a player your disks work in. And 2 years from now - when you are still typing comments on this board - you'll realize that your DVD+RW disks, which are now cupholders, are fun to look at while you're playing combat on your atari 2600.

DVD+RW is the way to go. New hardware compatibility ends up being a VHS/BetaMax coin flip. Buy your ROM from the same place you buy the Burner. Phillips is an industry leader for home / HIFI gear and spear headed +RW. HP made tons of CD burners, and HP went with the +RW format as well.

Pick up an HP 100iDVD +RW burner for 5 bills. Faster than -RW, DeCSS if you want, Warez the whole Adobe Publishing Suite on one disk, Ghost your whole OS and Apps drive on one disk, and Nero supports bootable +RW DVDs.

At work they even built a DVD Duplication Tower with an HP DVD ROM and 4 HP +RW drives. Rips out CDs and DVDs for less than the price of a CD Tower.

7im

For what its worth, WinXP has built in DVD-RAM abilities, and there is a strong focus on adding DVD+RW if you believe:
http://www.microsoft.com/WinHec/sessions2001/ConsumerStor.htm

(download and look at the .ppt file)

*cough* I don't see anything in there about DVD-RW. *cough*

Originally Posted by LocalYokel
Oops, looks like the secret\'s out. Man, I\'m never going to get that Thoroughbred now. ; )

Originally Posted by LocalYokel
BTW, article indexes are a forthcoming feature that should be coming soon. It\'s all part of the plan for world domination (I get a golden Tbred engineering sample for my end of the deal).

-- (Semi-)Anonymous Mole

Great Article.

Thank you for all the hard work and excellent comparisons!

D

I'm wondering what you l33t guYz think about this: http://dansdata.com/rw5120a.htm

#48, colorblind? One of those colors looks nothing like green.

Excuse me everybody, but I'm about to do a psycho...

AG#9 you are an ignorant retard quoting out of context like that...

If you had read the article properly, which I'm assuming by the comments you made that you didn't, you would have seen that Dr. Evil was talking about the practicality, not the moral ethics...

</end retard snap>,
IntelMole

All of the VBR stuff on www.dvdplusrw.org refer to set-top boxes (VCR replacements). Since the incoming video has a constant frame rate, VBR requires that the disc somehow handle variable burn rate. Neither format can actually handle this. Say that the video goes to black. The bit rate can be reduced to almost nothing, but the disc is still spinning, expecting data. What the recorder can do in this case is stop burning and start buffering up the data until there is enough to resume burning. But now it must figure out where it left off burning in order to pick up there. The DVD+RW specification allows for this type of gap. The DVD-R/RW specification does not.

You can see that for PC burners, this point is moot.

Xesdeeni

AG#52 -- ummmm..... NO. Double-sided DVDs basically have 2 bottoms, so there's no safe "top" area to write on.

doesn any one know if a disc is double side if u can still write on it with a pen . thanx bye

wtf #50

so if i encode my stuff to a variable bitrate mpeg2 stream and burn it to -RW that will re-encode it to fixed bitrate? you don't seem to know anything about digital video. the only difference is how the data is stored on the disc, i mean you can burn any data to both formats and it will still be the same data. just like you could burn a variable bitrate divx avi and that won't change.

You never go into the differences of how the two different standards record video.

I think it's interesting to know that DVD+RW uses variable bitrate encoding vs a fixed bit rate setting for DVD-R/RW.

Read more about this at http://www.dvdplusrw.org/

Okay, if the DVD+RW format is suddenly only 33% compatible, then what is this? :

http://www.dvdplusrw.org/resources/compatibilitylist_dvdvideo.html

Perhaps you could do your tests again and use the compatibility bit and see what happens.

Hi,
Great article- I've been looking into the DVD-RW scene, and your article has been an eye opener (as regards to compatibility results- the speed results were for the most part predictable).

However, for the sake of us who have trouble distinguishing between close colors, could you please post the results graphs in 2 different colors next time,
as in RED vs. BLUE, or something like that, rather than what looks to me like 2 shades of very similiar GREEN ?
THANK! :-)

Hi,
Great article- I've been looking into the DVD-RW scene, and your article has been an eye opener (as regards to compatibility results- the speed results were for the most part predictable).

However, for the sake of us who have trouble distinguishing between close colors, could you please post the results graphs in 2 different] colors next time,
as in RED vs. BLUE, or something like that, rather than what looks to me like 2 shades of very similiar GREEN ?
THANK! :-)

Hi,
Great article- I've been looking into the DVD-RW scene, and your article has been an eye opener (as regards to compatibility results- the speed results were for the most part predictable).

However, for the sake of us who have trouble distinguishing between close colors, could you please post the results graphs in 2 different] colors next time,
as in RED vs. BLUE}, or something like that, rather than what looks to me like 2 shades of very similiar GREEN ?
THANK! :-)

Originally Posted by drevil
#44:

Since both of these products are shipped as complete packages, I decided that I would restrict any additional utilities, etc. to those available from each manufacturer\'s website. Opening things up to third-party utilities would\'ve allowed for many more possibilities than I had time to test. Since Philips doesn\'t have a utility to change the compatibility bit, I didn\'t include this in my testing.

However, based on what I\'ve read from various sources, the compatibility bit seems to be a \"use it if you have to\" solution that can break compatibility with some players while helping with others, which is a bit of a shaky solution at best.

Andy,

Did you try using the Compatibility Bit Setting utility for the DVD+RW drive/disc?

http://www.dvdplusrw.org/resources/bitsettings.html

This does make a difference, and I wonder what it would have done to your compatibility test results.

Regards,
Shane.

[quote]
Second: "dash-R" and "dash-RW" are already the de facto standards
[/quote]

I'd argue that. When I search Veritas' site, I only find support for DVD-RAM in their backup software. When I search Dantz's site, I find DVD-RAM and DVD+RW. When I search Legato's website, I don't find DVD anything. When I search Computer Associate's website (ArcServeIt), I don't find DVD anything.

So as far as I'm concerned, DVD-R and DVD-RW lose 4 out of 4. DVD-RAM takes 2 of 4, and DVD+RW takes 1 of four.

Pragmatics, baby. What can I do with it today...

Originally Posted by LocalYokel
First of all, TiVo kicks ass, and it only collects information about its users as a group:
http://www.tivo.com/support/service_privacy_pvr.asp

Second: \"dash-R\" and \"dash-RW\" are already the de facto standards, and they were before DVD writing became an option in prebuilt desktops, and it happened when it w. It doesn\'t hurt that Apple got behind the dash over the plus, early in the game.

give me Mt Rainier support in a tasty (& cheap) ML drive anyday. 2GB per (hopefully, cheap) disc. They say minimum changes to current CDRW drives, so I can see the prices really coming down on these babies, unlike DVD *cough*

Plus, new higher capacity Blu-Ray DVDs coming out next year or so....yep, the industry heavyweightes are at it again, backing another new standard. What fun. Oh, and you can bet they've got 'content protection' high on their list of priorities this time.

Likely to see a lot more of that action happening in years ahead as capacity grows big time.

I wonder when MS et al will integrate Mt Rainier support in the OS. And then there's Serial ATA, another tasty technology. This year is sounding pretty good as far as new tech goes.

ML & Mr Rainier support for me in the meantime. I can see myself imaging ye olde HD on one of those babies. I just hope LiteOn releases one of their lovely "copy just about everything" versions.

Uggh, crackpot(/.) has sent out their hordes.

dang am i on the wrong board again?
doh.

danny e.

that was an example.... havent actually seen that one

danny e.

anyone else happen to be looking for jobs? lol i find some of the post the human resourses departments make hilarious.

"required skills: must have 6+ years exerperience in visual C++, mfc, 3+ years in C# development "

lol

danny e.

Originally Posted by nuclear
Maceman
You won\'t have soon the capacity of a tape drive like sdlt soon on a dvd
one sdlt tape holds 110megabytes
1 librairy (which is easier to have for tape cartridge since the technology hasn\'t changed since dlt 1. physically, they are the same cartridge)
Also sdlt does not need cleaning exept when you use many different cartridge for the first time, then you might need it.
where i work, whe have 8 sdlt drive running in a librairy. 1 tape did require cleaning because it is the first drive for each tape (we have around 500 tapes) but else, the new sdlt drive does not need cleaning.
SDLT is running at 15 megabytes per seconds. It does have a slow seek time. but you can in capacity.