Hot!! DVD Recorder-Copy DVDs to be played in regular DVD Players!

[dougjnn]

Macs are fashion statement computers. With way less power for the buck.

Personally, give me my mean black speed machine Antec SX1030b case. I mean even in the looks department. Then add in an Athlon 1.0@1.2ghz, DDR mobo and memory, 20 and 19" dual monitors, 2x45gb Ibm gxp Raid 0 array, eVGA geforce 32mb DDR gts, CD and CDRW, 512meg ram, all for about 2.5K soup to nuts. Show me that kind of power in an Apple system at any price. And show me what you can do for that price.

The PC world is much more tech cool, with home built, tweaking, overclocking and gaming big time. The MAC world has pretty translucent overpriced designs. For tech ignorant people. Who pay 50% more and are always off the power edge.

 

[Ian@CDRlabs]

DVD-R format has been around for over a year now.. unfortunately Pioneer was robbing everyone by charging $4000 for the drive and over $40 for dual sided and about $20 for single sided media.

OK along comes DVD+RW format. Does everything DVD-R can do.. plus rewrite DVD disks.. and yes these disks can also be used in all DVD-ROM drives. The DVD+RW format has the backing of A LOT of hardware companies right now.

Lowering prices on drives and media is Pioneer's way of getting their standard accepted. As far as getting the media under a buck.. thats from Pioneers PR people. Yes they are probably full of cr*p... it will be interesting anyway to see where this goes.

I know a lot of Mac people excited about this. The way Apple and Pioneer is promoting the technology as that its new (its not) and designed for the Mac (its not). I informed a lot of the Mac people that its also shipping on the Presarion 7000.. they weren't too excited any more.

DVD software for PC.. there are actually quite a few decent packages.. I get PR releases about them weekly. Usually they are expensive and only work with certain drives.

As far as DVD speeds.. CDROM 1x = 150Kb/s And I believe that a DVD-ROM is 1x = 1500Kb/s. I don't remember off the top of my head.

 

[tigerbait]

hey dougjnn,
I have made some good SVHS transfer myself. Picture quality isn't bad, but you lose the 5.1 sound, which I think is the biggest perk of DVD.

 

[Misstress Sarah]

<< Also because of the CSS encryption on the disks it wont be possible to do a simple &quot;disk copy&quot; unless a clever hacker comes up with a way. >>




the CSS encryption was broken a long time ago.

 

[Zucchini]

to the question of speed, i think 1x dvd =9x cdrom.

 

[Rendus]

DVD-ROM speed has nothing to do with it's CD-ROM speed.

The usual bitrate for DVD MPEG2 video is 7.5mbits/sec, although I THINK I've seen a couple disks (my Rocky Horror Picture Show disk I think is one) go to 7.8. I'd have to guess 1X DVD is about 8mbits/sec (1mbyte/sec). 1X CD-ROM is 150kbytes/sec.

 

[DocBurner]

the fastest cd rom drive reads cds faster then then the fastest dvd drive (although the dvd drive may read dvds faster then cds and definitely faster then a cd rom drive will ever read it)

 

[macssuck]

<---------------

 

[MichaelJ]

&quot;Also all fo you are forgetting one HUGH thing. There are ZERO, NONE, NADA good dvd burning / authoring tools for the PC. &quot;

WRONG, buffer breath.

There are now excellent DVD authoring software programs that even the ignorant can operate. Can you say &quot;drag and drop&quot;? I knew you could. Take a look at Sonic &quot;DVDit&quot; or &quot;MyDVD&quot; or even Pixeltools &quot;ExpertDVD&quot;

When blank media costs drop below $5.00 or so, this market will explode. CDRW will be antique.

 

[Zucchini]

Heh, that and true X dvd drives, now that would be sweet

 

[Gunbuster]

Apple just has to do this to make up for overlooking that newfangled thing called a CDRW drive in all it's machines

 

[dougjnn]

The &quot;killer app&quot; for DVD-RW drives will be copying PC and X-box DVD game titles, I'm afraid.

Copying $45-60 game titles which don't sell for discount much when then are still fairly new will seem much tastier to people than copyihg DVD movies which can be bought for $18 or even $16 sometimes. At least when the cost of the blanks isn't far off that range.

Then when the price of the blanks gets cheap, the use of DVD-RW will expand into music, backup, etc.

My take anyway.

 

[Hohlraum]

Copying dvd's? are you guys nuts? Most (all?) DVD-* technologies are currently single side, single layer. I think most technologies are between 4.7 and 5.7GB of storable data. I don't know of many DVD's that don't atleast use single sided, double layer. Maybe without the extra's you'd get it into 4.7GB but I doubt it. Lets hope it won't be more than a year before they have double layer drives/discs available.

 

[anazoal]

IMHO this is not that great a deal because the limited capacity is less than most DVD movies. A better deal is to use MPEG4 compression. Yes, you need a fast CPU (500 MHz at least), but you can fit a whole DVD on a CD ROM!!!!! Like bhn_ack said, that's great for making movies to view on a laptop.

-----
For all you Mac bashes, have you used a Mac extensivley? I could digitize movies back on my 1992 Mac Quadra. Have you used applications made specifically for the Mac (not the overbloated apps ported from windows)? MacDraw (circa 1991) could fit on a floppy disk and is only slightly less powerful than Visio 2000 (circa 2000) on the PC -- MINIMUM Visio installation is ~48 MB (not including templates or help).

BTW I use a PC as well.

 

[horatio]

I've always thought that the best application of DVD-R would not be copying DVDs (which are already pretty cheap compared to media prices) but archiving cool TV programs that studios are dragging their feet on. Witness Star Trek, coming out at the speedy rate of two episodes every other month or so (just the Original Series). By the time Next Generation starts coming out, DVD will be long gone. For that matter, I will be long gone.

 

[Souka]

Hehehe...wonder if this thread will get LOCKED!

I don't see the &quot;hot deal&quot; anymore....just chit chat...wrong forum.

 

[gwbaker]

Everyone should own a mac!!! I mean they are a bit on the expensive side, but they sure make a purty door stop!

 

[dougjnn]

anazoal --

I agree there was an argument to be made for Macs back in the early 90s when Windows genuinely truly sucked, and the PC had precious few well coded multimedia type applications closely written for it. A very good argument. Macs were of course even more expensive then, but they were the only game in town for some things. And the only good game in town for a lot more things.

But those days are long gone. There's hardly anything on macs that isn't also on PCs now, and running faster, and much cheaper, due to the much bigger horsepower of pc machines. And of course there is tons of stuff on PC's that isn't on Macs at all, or only on as badly translated slow running stuff. Starting with games, but including all sorts of things.

 

[robbin]

What most people fail to realize is comparing mac hardware to ibm compatible hardware is like comparing apples to oranges. They're both fruits but not in the same family. Comparing MhZ doesn't work. Although, were you to put a mac with similar firepower of a PC against that PC the mac would run circles around it everytime.

That said however, Mac's are way pricey, even their low-end stuff is too much for the average buyer, or the average techie that wants to cobble together a machine from parts he/she can get with copious amounts of coupons, pricematching, instant and mail-in rebates and bargain hunting.

 

[Jamey]

So many posts about mpg4 and no links to show how to get started. You guys that want to spout a technology to others like it is better should show where and how to get started so we can judge for ourselves.

 

[TAsunder]

Jamey,

Try Tom's Hardware's Article. You will need a DVD Ripper. Try searching on Deja.Com's Usenet Area or the like. I think there's one called &quot;DVD Decrypter&quot;. FlaskMpeg's Divx sound stuff is pretty buggy, too. People supposedly say it's better to encode the audio in PCM with Flask and then use some OTHER utility to compress the audio. I forget the name of one of those, something like virtualDub.

The problem with Mpeg4 is that you are rarely going to get the movie onto one CD with the same resolution video etc. I tried it briefly with The Third Man, which is about 100 minutes, and had to go down to 320x240 and use &quot;Fast Motion&quot; (choppier)... Since I have a nice home theater Mpeg4 is even less of an option. I'd rather have a VHS tape (which will have higher quality picture though lower quality sound), though of course simply paying the $15 for the DVD is the best option if you want all the features and sound, picture, etc.

 

[DonaldDuck82]

i have some mpg4 movies for my computer, but my parents have a dvd player that plays - cd movies - any idea how to convert the mpg4 to &quot;cd movie?&quot;

 

[Zucchini]

well cd movies means vcd. One problem is many dvd players can't play cd-r's.. so you might be screwed b4 u start. That and to make a vcd from a divx requires that you recompress the movie as mpeg 1, about 1 hr per disc. Your quality will go from suck to very bad, its not worth the trouble. Thats what dvd's are for

 

[her209]

Where do you get the 18GB DVD-R to record?

 

[JavaCool]

PC/Mac prejudice is suck. It's sooo annoying when people simply say, &quot;Macs Suck!&quot; without backing it up. I use both platforms and agree that in recent years PCs have caught up to Macs in the areas where Macs had orginally led (ie. graphics and a user-friendly platform). Personally, I like Apple. It is a very unique company with unique ideas. Apple is always one of the first companies to utilize new technologies, which is part of the reason why its prices are always so high. My first mac (quadra 605) had scsi...and that was about a decade ago. Now Macs have firewire and dvd writers... Apple's originality and creativity is why I've always held a great deal of respect for them...it's just that i don't respect them enough to pay 3k for one of their computers..

btw...PCs are cool too...


my 2cents...