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What's the Deal With Writeable DVD? 158

Posted by Cliff from the when-will-we-be-able-to-do-it dept.
almondjoy notes that, three days ago: "Creative Labs product support tells me they have discontinued their DVD-RAM product line. Is competing specifications really what is destroying momentum of writeable DVD technology into end user systems? Is 'planned obsolescence' the culprit here? All I want to do is dump and/or mix raw mini-DV footage from my digicam onto recordable DVD media. Better yet, I'd like to be able to take that little DV tape and load it into a mini DV drive (is it 4mm DAT?) on my DVD system, and shoot more movies while I'm saving footage to DVD media. I'd also like to make backups of my VMWare guest OS virtual disks to DVD. Wishfull thinking? I did find this nice media compatibility matrix for the different DVD writeable formats, part of the DVD FAQ at DVD Demystified - what a mess!"
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What's the Deal With Writeable DVD? More

What's the Deal With Writeable DVD?

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  • mini dv and dat (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    MiniDV is by no means the same as 4mm dat. not compatible, not the same size, etc... and wait for DVD-R. Its already on the market albeit expensive, but I considered DVD-RAM obsolete when it first hit the market, given that only a handful of drives could ever read it.

  • Re:DVD General vs. DVD for Professionals (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yep. Just like they were gonna stop producing audio cassettes 15 yrs ago.

  • Why I don't want this to happen. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I don't want writeable DVDs. Why? Because the minute they come out, everyone starts pointing their finger at LINUX users and saying "Oh, look at that lot of software pirates." That's just what we need right now -- With Microsoft calling foul on us, saying we don't like capatalism, and with DeCSS fiasco trying to throw a fuckin 15'YO in court. I say we just stick to CDRs. I don't want the RIAA knocking at my door because they notice I have a cable modem and thinks that I must indeed own a DVD writer. Fuck your impatience, get a brain and read a book.

  • DV "drive"? Try a deck! (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 17, 2001 @12:38PM (#215462)
    I work with DV stuff a lot at the student TV station I work at. We have a Sony DV deck hooked up to a Mac G4 through Firewire; it basically acts as an external "DV drive". You can use it to capture DV media to the computer, and output from the computer to DV, without using your camera. All it takes is a Firewire card, but if you're inputting from a camera you're using Firewire already anyway.

    Of course, these things are expensive, but you might look at a Sony DSR-11 or DSR-30 for those purposes. Also, keep in mind, that right now, buying DV media in bulk and using it for archiving is probably actually cheaper than going to DVD writeable media right now. You can get blank DV tapes in bulk, good Sony ones, for under $10 each; I don't think writeable DVDs are anywhere near this, and they won't hold too much more in DV quality than DV tapes do.

    DV is also an established standard. Buy a DV deck and it'll still be useful in 5 years. I doubt DVD-RAM will be, esp. with behavior like that from Creative Labs.

    ---
    I'm not a real anonymous coward, I just play one on TV.

  • Product Ignorance. (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 17, 2001 @11:12AM (#215463)
    There are already a few comments here to get a Mac with a superdrive but that dosent really say or answer any questions here.

    Apple provides a complete package to do just this sort of thing.

    1: Apple's G4 can be ordered with a "Superdrive" that will do CD-Rom, CD-WR, DVD-Rom, DVD-R.

    2: The G4 has built-in Firewire ports to connect your digital camera to with ease.

    3: Apple bundles for FREE a software package called iMovie that lets you take all your digital footage and make your own home movies, add titles effects, transitions music, etc. Then output it back to your camera in perfect digital quality, OR send the output to their iDVD package.

    4: Apple also bundles a superb and easy to use software package called "iDVD" that lets you easily create and burn your own DVDs that are playable in practically any consumer DVD player or computer. If you want more features then the iDVD package you can order "DVD Studio pro" which offers a ton more features for the professional.

    Links:
    Apple - PowerMac G4 & DVD Authoring [apple.com]
    Apple - iMovie [apple.com]
    Apple - iDVD [apple.com]

    Conclusion:
    Since Apple provides every portion of this package (most of them for FREE) you get a nice tightly integrated chunk of software and hardware that all works easily with each other.

    Even if you dont like Apple, its OS or its cutesy hardware you cant deny that the simplicity and power of this kind of technology is staggering, considering how inexpesive the computer is compared to a PC with the same hardware specs, software and feature set. Of course theres no guarantee that its all going to work seemlessly on your PC when you get it either.

    -HackManColtaire-
    hackmanc@mac.com
  • If all you want to do is archive the DV footage...leave it on the DV tapes. DVD-Rs have only now come down to $10 for a 4.7GB disc, while MiniDV tapes are about $6 for 13GB of storage. I don't know anything about the archival characteristics of DVD-R media, but tape is a known quantity, and since it's digital, you can "refresh" your archive periodically.


    A great point - however if you are doing editing/post with this DV, pulling it off the miniDV tapes everytime you need something would be a pain. Storing a series of raw scenes on a DVD-R would let you keep all the data online, but not taking up your hard drive.

    Of course, if you are spending major amount of time doing this sorta stuff, you probably already have a fleet of 60GB hard drives :)
  • 1) DVD's don't have to have CSS on them. (neither do they have to be region locked).

    2) You were probably not watching a HD DVD on that HD-TV. Most DVDs shipping are not high definition.
  • I was in Tower Records on Yonge St, Toronto the other day. They had one (small) section full of the Sony Super CDs (SACD)... and sprinkled amongst them were about 5 different DVD-Audios. If that's anything to go by, SACD is the more popular at the moment, but that could just be head start or heavier promotion.

    I've also just ordered a DTS CD and a DVD-Audio from http://www.dvdboxoffice.com/ [dvdboxoffice.com], so I will soon find out if it's worth the fuss. Playback will be on my DVD-Video player, which I believe isn't quite as good as a true DVD-A player. This compatibility makes me think that DVD-A will ultimately beat SACD.
  • What's the next generation of audio format going to be? DAD, DVD Audio, SACD? The uncertainty is giving me fits. I just built a DAC with 192KHz/24-bit capability, and a multitude of physical interfaces, but my source material is ALL still 44.1KHz/16-bit CD Audio. I'd love to by a new transport but I have no clue what the winner is going to be.
  • What the hell are you talking about? Haven't adopted DV yet? Do you even know what DV is? You have basically two choices today, buy an old camcorder that uses analog format or buy a new camcorder that uses digital format (DV). The reason they can't support the analog version is the same reason that it's never been used for much, you need gobs of hardware to do real-time video capture. If you buy Sony's DVMC then you can easily use your old analog video and convert it to DV format. And let me specifically point out that DV is a format used by camcorders et al, it is *not* an Apple format.

    As for why would anyone want to make their own DVDs? That's obvious, how else are you going to make your professionaly cut home pr0n?

    By the way, ye so ignorant one, firewire == IEEE1394 == Sony i-link is the plug used by camcorders to spit out DV data. It is not going away for a long time.

    It's also obvious that you've never made your own videos. If you did you'd know that there's usually less than 20% of the recording that you'd like to keep. Thus the argument that DV tapes are cheaper is not true since you would only archive the decent stuff, saving considerable room on your DVD-R.

  • Well then, if you don't know or don't care what DV is then guess what? When you go to the camcorder store and buy yourself a cheap camcorder then you will find yourself the owner of a DV format camcorder. Why? It's not digital cause it is better (although it is better), it is digital because it's cheaper. And, btw, DV cameras have standard video out capability, thus you can use these cameras the same as you always have.

    And also note that firewire is not only Sony, pretty much all of the digitial camcorders have firewire plugs on them for DV data. DV is like saying NTSC/PAL, it is the format of the video. That's why DV is *nothing* like DAT, MD, or betamax. Those are all storage mediums like CD-R, cassette tapes, VHS. DV is a format!!! Hell even the tapes used by Sony vs the others is different. Sony supported DV using their digital-8mm tapes. That is why you can store DV data on your hard drive. Can you store a betamax tape on your hard drive?

    Everyone will be using DV data at some point precisely for the reason that consumers are cheap idiots.

    Notice that nowhere here did I mention Apple. That is because Apple is merely supporting DV and the creation of playable DVDs. Much like they are supporting the creation of audio CDs from mp3 files.

  • You know, I thought of making a table, spelling it out, maybe talking sloooowwwweeeeerrrrr... But I decided against it. There is ignorance, which is perfectly alright, everyone is ignorant at some point in their life. There is also blissful ignorance, which I so desperately wish I had never left. And then there is pure, unadulterated stupidity. I can see why so many tire of /. and praise the non-anonymity of k5. For I am sure this person would not want their identity known for fear that his boss might find out how truly hopeless he is.

  • bull (Score:1)

    by battjt ( 9342 )
    >If you want the data to actually be _safe_, then
    >you've got to have off-line copies

    I've got all my school work from '90-'94 and I've lost about 3 drives since I started keeping this stuff. I use machine to machine backups, multiple OSs and raid arrays. This is completeley automated as opposed to manually finding a tape, putting it in a recorder, putting it in a cabinet, indexing it, dusting it, reindexing it, etc.

    To delete my datastructures homework from 1991, you'd need to delete it from a Debian box (in two different places (one of which might not even be mounted and the other is mirrored)), a RedHat box, and my laptop (which is normally with me 90 miles from the other two). No offline backups, and I think my data is safe. I suppose that my house could catch on fire and I could wreck my car on the way home, but then my data structures homework is the least of my worries.

    And, I don't keep a clean enough house to even find my offline data.

    Joe

  • Going where no webcam has gone before (Score:4)

    by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @10:02PM (#215472)
    So..you're whining about DVD-RAM? What reality distortion field did you fucking fall into? DVD-RAM was meant to go obsolete as soon as DVD-R hit the market. It was a go-nowhere product. Wow I can write 4.2GB onto a disk is about an hour and can only play it back on the drive I wrote it with? And that's useful how? Recordable DVDs at this point are a waste of cash, you can fit 4.7 gigs onto a couple CDs for about 3$ on a writer that costs literally a tenth of a DVD-RAM/R. Unfortunately you're suffering the woes of the early adopter, in a couple years DVD-Rs will cost you about a hundred bucks and media will be nearly as cheap as CDs. Don't bitch about it though, its like people whining because they've got SysQ or Fujitsu MO drives. Not all technologies survive the market place dispite cool factor. Shit man I remember being stoked as shit when I got my 1GB Jaz drive, I could back up my entire hard drive on that thing! My friend and I both got a Jaz at the same time and thats how we swapped everything. Woe to us that the disks were neigh 100$. I've bought one extra Jaz disk in my life. I've still got the original Tools disk lying around with the Win95 drivers on it. That was three years and several hard drives and computers ago.
  • A great point - however if you are doing editing/post with this DV, pulling it off the miniDV tapes everytime you need something would be a pain. Storing a series of raw scenes on a DVD-R would let you keep all the data online, but not taking up your hard drive.

    Probably not worth it, really. DV is 25Mb/s, DVD is 10. So you need at least a 4xDVD-ROM for DVD-R to be any faster than DV. The fastest DVD-ROM read speed I've seen is 10x, and you know that these speeds are peak, just like a CD-ROM drive. So we triple the media cost, spend time burning DVD-ROMs, and get, at best, a 4x speed improvement when it comes time to go get the footage again.

    There are better ways. Keep your video on tape, log your footage carefully, and then keep the logs online and the tapes on the shelf. Batch capture works so well on modern NLEs that you can just feed the tapes in and let the machine do the work.

    There's actually a very good reason why video and tape go hand in hand. Tape is excellent at capturing data with moderate bandwidth for extremely long durations. Sure, random access is cool, but video is by nature sequential.

    -Zandr

  • Actually, the article is talking about miniDVD, which is a full UDF DVD with 720x480 MPEG2. Essentially a DVD-Video disc written on CD-R[W] media.

    Works in some players, but requires significantly more than the 2x spindle speed of SVCD.

    -Zandr
  • Under 5 megabytes a second, sorry. You're wrong on this one.

    Keep your units straight. DV is 25Mb/s, or 3.2MB/s. DVD tops out at 10Mb/s, or 1.2MB/s

    Not to mention the fact that 16x DVD drives are all over the place...

    Fine. 16 x 10Mb/s is still only about 6x DV, and you're limited to about 20 minutes per DVD, so you're changing media about three times as often to boot. I just can't see how it's worth archiving DV on DVD-ROM.

    If the $/GB for DVD-R drops below that of MiniDV tape then it _might_ be worth looking at, but the hassle factor is still high.
  • The 103/A03 writes DVD-R at 2x. But DVD is inherently a variable-speed format. The 2x is in reference to full-bit-rate, which is about 10 megabits/s. So, 2x is about 2.5 megabytes/second. 4.7GB at 2.5MB/s is 32 minutes.
  • The "SuperDrive" will be nothing more than a repackaged product from Philips, Sony or one of the several other DVD-R/CD-R drives that are just about to be released. And Apple won't have them before any PC parts house will.

    Umm. Wrong. First of all. the SuperDrive is a Pioneer DVR-103. Second, the PC parts houses don't have them yet, and even Compaq isn't shipping them yet. But Apple is. I've had one for two months now. Expect it to be another two months before Pioneer ramps up to the point that they've saturated Apple and Compaq, then you'll start seeing them on pricewatch.

  • All this exists...but DVD-RAM ain't it. (Score:5)

    by n6mod ( 17734 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @10:54AM (#215478) Homepage
    DVD-RAM specifically is a brain-dead standard. Sure, Hitachi has a camcorder that records directly to (3") DVD-RAMs, but then Sony has a camcorder that records directly to MD-Data2 and that's not going to go anywhere either.

    But what you're looking for is DVD-R, and subsequently DVD-RW.

    The drives are shipping now, though Apple is consuming 100% of the supply. The drive in question is the DVR-103/DVR-A03, and it can record DVD-R and DVD-RW. Compaq will be shipping the drives soon, and you'll also start seing them in external FireWire enclosures in the next couple of months.

    To your specific questions:

    All I want to do is dump and/or mix raw mini-DV footage from my digicam onto recordable DVD media.


    Remember that DVD-Video is MPEG2, and DV is not. (DV is more closely related to a series of JPEG frames) This means that there will be substantial encoding time if you want to make these discs playable in set-top DVD players.

    If all you want to do is archive the DV footage...leave it on the DV tapes. DVD-Rs have only now come down to $10 for a 4.7GB disc, while MiniDV tapes are about $6 for 13GB of storage. I don't know anything about the archival characteristics of DVD-R media, but tape is a known quantity, and since it's digital, you can "refresh" your archive periodically.

    Better yet, I'd like to be able to take that little DV tape and load it into a mini DV drive (is it 4mm DAT?) on my DVD system, and shoot more movies while I'm saving footage to DVD media.


    You still have the encode time issue above. MiniDV is not 4mm DAT, but Sony does (did? I keep seeing closeouts) make a deck that fits in a 5.25" drive bay. It's called the DRV-100. Internal or not, the interface is still Firewire, so you're better off with an external deck.

    I'd also like to make backups of my VMWare guest OS virtual disks to DVD.


    No problem. The drive is also a CD-RW machine, so it's a "small matter of software" to get it working burning DVD-ROMs. Toast is already there on the Mac.

    -Zandr

  • Read about [dvdcreation.com] Pinnacle's new software that will somehow let you use a CD-R to create discs that a DVD player can read. Not full length, mind you, but it would be nice for distributing edited MiniDV footage...
  • Even without compression, 200GB translates to 43 disks, and you could probably half that with compression (depending on the files). Not terribly pleasant admittedly but, as mentioned, there are no other current or short-term alternatives (short of tape drives, which at the 100GB plus size is very expensive for a home machine).

    Having 160GB of audio files (wav) myself, DVD is an annoying backup solution, but it's better than ripping 300+ CD's all over again. That plus the ability to burn movies and watch them on a DVD player make these drives useful, at least for some.
  • Thanks for the info. I kept it wav so that I can burn to CDs and didn't even think to check if there were any playable lossless compression schemes. Monkeys Audio and FLAC look interesting.
  • I'm sure this is it --- DVD-RAM was a waste of time to start with, being incompatible with DVD players. DVD-R is compatible, so why would anyone want DVD-RAM any more?
  • ide != fast, ide==cheap ide is very processor intensive. scsi is the way to go!

    Not any more it's not. IDE with busmastering and ultra DMA is FAST, and not processor intensive at all.

    Simon
  • Hey brainiac, have you even went out and bought a DVD player? Less than half of the models out there even support CDR/RW disks which means your burned VCDs are worthless on them. I recommend that if you want to do this you do your homework before you buy, that way you don't get home and stick in that Matrix bootleg and go WTF!
  • Hah! I started out with my trusty 1MHz Z80 recording at 300baud onto audio tape, and where is audio tape now - right here baby! Where are 5.25" floppies - dead as a dodo!

    You really shouldn't jump on all these technology fads.
  • 8" floppy, but 15" hard (removable pack) - that's the way to go!

    The disk pack was on a PDP-11, but I also remember my first hard drive (circa 1982-3) - a whopping 10MB capacity (they had 5MB ones too).

    But hey - I go back to punched cards too. I used to love using the duplicate key to fix errors - it sounded like a machine gun!

  • After all, after pr0n, mp3s, DivX DVD rips, and a shitload of anime, my 75GB IBM drive doesn't cut it any more.

    Hell, just my mp3s consume not 1 but 2 60 GB drives. I'm now on a 40 GB hd because it's empty.

    I'm selling my 200 disc CD changer because mp3s (encoded with lame -b 256 -h -ms -p)[1] sound as good and are much much more accessible than my extensive CD collection.

    As far as these CD-R/DVD/Etc - IDE HDs are the cheapest option right now. Hell, you can get an 80 GB HD for 200 bucks. If you've got to back up that much data, just grab a couple of those and back it up, then place the disks back in their static-proof bag, and stick them on the shelf. I guess tape might still be cheaper, but if your pressed for space and/or speed - the IDE drive is the new standard.

    [1] Don't bitch about how that's too much space. HDs are cheap and I know that mp3s at that setting are of a higher quality than my ear can distinguish. So :p.

    HI Mom!
  • You're right - maybe I, like 90% of the population, don't know what DV is. Or care.

    But if they've bought a video camera in the last -- what -- three years, then they already have DV. This number is only going to increase over time. There's really no point in dealing with non-DV formats if you want to end up outputting to DVD, because the quality will suffer to much in the process. As for why you'd want to output to DVD, see my other response higher in the thread.

    DVD has sold well not because of better resolution, but because of 5.1 sound.

    Hmmmmmm.

    You make the bad assumption that everyone is looking to buy a new camcorder, but many people are happy with their VHS, 8mm, and even betamax cameras.

    Until they buy something else, which is inevitable for most people who own this stuff in the first place.

    I'm sure, thanks to Sony, firewire won't go away for a long time. It will die a slow and painful death like beta, DAT and MD.

    And it will die at the mercy of....? Everybody significant is backing DV/FireWire. Dell provides FireWire options, right? Apple and Sony ship it standard on their machines, and it's built into just about every video camera made in the last several years. Do you know how fast people are buying these things? Microsoft is also backing FireWire in Windows.

    And I have made my own videos, all 3 of them over the last 10 yrs. I consider myself an average user. I sure as hell don't want to buy a new camera, computer, and media to edit a video once every 3 yrs, why would anyone else?

    You will need a new camera. You don't need to buy a new computer, you just get a FireWire card. And you're going to buy new media anyway, which is pretty cheap.

    iMovie, DV, D8, all of it is fine technology. As was beta and MD. But if the average joe doesn't want to fork over the extra money for it, how long will your product last?

    You make it sound like there's something else you can buy today. Realize if you walk into a consumer electronics store and buy a video camera, you're getting a DV camera. This has been the case for a while. People still have non-DV equipment, but that's going to fade through attrition. Eventually, something will replace DV as well.

    This I can guarantee you: the market is not going to return to High-8.

    Their market research consists of Mac addicts, so Mac fans get what Mac fans want. Nevermind that non-Mac users don't care for any of it.

    What does this have to do with to do with DV?

    - Scott
    --
    Scott Stevenson
    WildTofu [wildtofu.com]
  • if you have 160GB of wav files, why dont you use one of the multitude of lossless compression algorithems out there? If you prefer cross platform, open source, FLAC [sourceforge.net] is what you want. If your windows only, programs like Monkeys Audio [monkeysaudio.com] and RKAU [virtualave.net] provide slightly more compressed results. These all seem to vary from the .5 to .75 compression area, turning that 160G into more like 110G.
  • Another possiblity is the industry is waiting to see the viability of 10+ layer fluorescent disks that hold 100GB+ of data. Constilation 3D developed the FMD drive which appears to be an incredible technology. You can read about them here [c-3d.net] and you can check out their stock here [yahoo.com]

  • You call up technical support, realise you forgot to ask them a few things, and post the questions to Slashdot?

    The fact that one company has stopped making DVD-RAM drives does not mean that the drives are not made by anyone! However, I beleive the reason is likely to be that writable DVD drives, that create proper DVDs which can be read in any DVD-ROM drive, are being pushed. Although unless there is a price drop, that might be delusional on the manufacturer's part.

  • Most of the comments I've seen have to do with computers, which doesn't sound like what you want at all. Sounds like you want a pioneer dvr-2000 [pioneer.co.jp], which does realtime recording to DVD from a variety of video sources. No software, just plug your digicam in and bam, you've got a DVD.

    It would be nice if there was a model with an integrated miniDV playback deck. You don't want to be using your camera as a playback deck and a seperate miniDV deck will have lots of the same features as the dvr-2000.

  • If I even owned a DVD player (and I won't until the nonsense ceases), it really wouldn't be worth my time and money. I'd rather buy the DVD for $20-25 or else wait until it comes out of rental and the price comes down (since I assume that most new releases [will] go for $75-125 for 6 months as they do on VHS). On the other hand, giving home movies of the kid to the grandparents IS useful.

    Boss of nothin. Big deal.
    Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.

  • You are confusing (Score:5)

    by wiredog ( 43288 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @11:01AM (#215494) Journal
    The encrypted video format with the disk itself. The layout of tracks/data on a dvd is fairly standardized, and the MPAA has no control over how an end user stores data on the disk, excepting that the end user can't store video in the encrypted format that the MPAA uses. But you can make your own unencrypted dvd video disks and distribute them without paying royalties.
  • (I actually remember in 1979 when I thought that 30 pages (120K) of mainframe disk storage would be lots... A year later I was at 10 times that, and the storage curve had started.)

    The two primary purposes of backups are storage extension and disaster recovery. Ever growing disk sizes have pretty much obviated the storage extension problem. The remaining purpose is disaster recovery..

    My home directory is 'only' 2 Gigabytes. Out of that, my mail spool is about 150 Meg (I routinely go through and delete the 50MB video attachments). my text directory is about 40 meg and my public_html directory is about 159 meg (but that includes about 100 meg worth of RedHat extracts.

    That makes up about 95% of the data that I have that is not recoverable by other means (i.e. the rest is source, binaries, data, etc. culled off the net, digitized pictures, etc.). (other unrecoverable stuff would be things like PGP keys and a few meg of source code).

    After compression, most of my really important - to - backup data could almost fit on an old ZIP disk. I can back that up and save it in a safe deposit box in the bank once every few months, in case of a house fire. If my computer gets stolen or melts down (in a fire), I can recover the other stuff by scouring the net.

    I really don't need to backup my redhat sources, random captured videos, etc. I can, at worst, repurchase those using insurance money in the case of a disaster (that's what insurance is for). Yes it'll take time, but I should be able to recover the stuff that I really need. Of course, the REAL hope is that I won't ever actually need the disaster recovery features (that's what the insurance company bets on).

    If you only back up the stuff that it would be a real tragedy to loose, I think that you'll find that your backup needs drop dramatically.
    --

  • If you've got lots and lots of data (most of which you're not going to be looking at for a long time), then there's still not much that can beat tape. Pop in a tape drive, dump the stuff down, and then put the tape someplace safe. Repeat a few times, and then toss the tape and replace it with a new one.

    Most of my old video is still on tape. It needs to be transferred (to refresh it), but other than that, I haven't looked at most of it for years.

    I backup my data to tape on a regular basis. Usually by the time the tape format is bacoming obsolete, Disk drive storage has advanced to the point where I can load the whole tape onto a disk and include it in my next backup. That's how I get around the obsolesence problem.

    (you might also want to read my earlier post [slashdot.org] about how most of the data I have on my disk doesn't really need to be backed up).
    --

  • Man, am I showing my age now.

    hard disks
    My first unix system was a Radio Shack Model 16 box (first one in Edmonton -- I used to work at the Radio Shack Computer Store). It had dual 8" double sided drives that stored 1 Meg each. The hard drive was an external 14inch, 9Megabyte drive (originally rated for 8, but it had far fewer bad blocks than they expected). I was contracted to get Xenix to run without the hard drive. I managed to get it to boot one one floppy (including swap) with the second floppy drive mountable for storage (and extra programs).

    For those of you wondering why, the Hard disk cost $5,000 (that's 1980 dollars).

    A REAL floppy disk
    I also worked at an IBM Mainframe shop, where some data was still stored on 12" floppy drives... If you want to know where the name for floppy disks came from, imagane the case material used in a 5.25" disk being used for something the size of an old LP. Now that's floppy.

    Punch cards About 1979, a friend's dad ran across an interesting problem. Someone at Boeing Timesharing had managed to 'drop' a HUGE stack of computer punch cards. I'm talking a trunk load of these things. They still needed them in card format, and sorted, but it was near the lifetime of Punched cards, and a card punch that could survive that sort of bulk punching attached to a computer that could sort that much data was rare.

    The most cost effective solution turned out to be shipping the cards to Edmonton where they were read into the University Of Alberta mainframe (which was available for commercial use -- another story in itself), sorted in memory, punched back out and the new deck shipped back to Seattle (I think). I got told the story when he showed me the original (unsorted) card deck (OK: Pile) in a back room.

    Still thinking the old way
    A story off the early net... In the early '80s a programmer was asked to write an EMACS macro that could sort the lines of a file according to columbs 72-80. The person who asked him to do it seemed pretty pissed that the functionality wasn't already in emacs.

    He dutifully wrote the sort function, and then he found out what it was wanted for...

    In the days of punched cards, your card deck would contain sequence numbers in columns 72-80. This was so that when (not if) you dropped your card deck you could simply runit through a mechanical card sorter, and get your deck back in the proper order. These sequence numbers were usually done in increments of 100 or 1000 so that you had room to insert new 'lines' into your program without having to resequence the whole deck. 'Modern' Card punch keyboards could be programmed to sequence cards automagically as you typed them. Language standards (Fortran, Cobol, etc.) were also designed around this necessity.

    It seems that the old fogey was so used to punched cards and sequence numbers that he couldn't think of any other way to do this. When the guy wanted to move a couple of lines in the file he would change the sequence numbers and then call the Emacs mscro to sort the file. He never bothered asking if EMACS had a 'move lines' command.
    --

  • One of the major problems I encountered with recordable DVDs was the extremely long write time. The ones that I've used are 1x or 2x, which means an hour or two or recording. This reminds me of 96 or so when the speedy 1x CD-Rs were coming on the market. I think one of the reasons for slow initial adoption there was the 1+ hour write time.

    Until DVDs can be spun in under 30 minutes, I see them only useful for backups, but tape is better, cheaper, and more reliable for that anyway.

  • MPEG is Motion Picture Experts Group.

    JPEG is Joint Photographic Experts Group.
    JPEG puts out a standard called MJPEG, motion jpeg, that is just a bunch of jpegs sent togeather..
    MPEG puts out the MPEG1-4 standards, which have compression of a keyframe, then record the difference between frames, saving even more bitrate.
  • Not a Panasonic press release but a CEBIT review:

    http://www.guru3d.com/cgi-bin/newspro/ktalk/985170 455,97536,.shtml [guru3d.com]

    No prices either. :(
  • The same group of people who whine about no alternatives and always being forced into doing something is now asking for a SINGLE dvd standard? Wow... talk about hypocrits.[sic]

    I see statements like this around here surprisingly often. What it fails to take into account is context. Specifically, the choice between unity and variety should be made based on which enhances the flow of information.

    When talking about programs to edit files of type x, you want more than one available so that you can use the one that best suits your situation. When you're talking about the files themselves, you want a standard (or maybe a small few) so that you can give the file to someone else and be reasonably assured that s/he can read the file.

    The standards with which most slashdotters seem to have problems are extremely closed ones which by their very nature inhibit the flow of information. Since a DVD-R standard would enhance, not restrict information flow, there is no hypocricy in advocating one.

  • US$110 at CostCo. Maxtor 30GB 7200RPM
  • All the vendors told me they will not guarantee working with other vendors.

    Jeez how long did it take 5.25" floppies to standardize?

    Oh they never did.....
  • WRT: FMD

    http://www.c-3d.net/

    They're a publicly traded company, yet without a single available product...unless patents count; over 80 and counting.
  • I would tend to agree on the point about the DVD-RAM drives, I never considered one because I could not burn something and read it on anything except the DVD-RAM drive.

    Now on the point of DVD-R drives (and I bet once that is out, you'll see the whole "RW" scam proliferated again on this media) being expensive, yeah they cost upwards of $5000 right now, but so did CD-R drives when they first came out, heck I paid over $800 for my first 2x CD-R drive. DVD-R media is expensive, again CD-R's were the same when they came out.

    It will be expensive for a while for DVD-R because the people who make this stuff up (Sony, Panasonic, etc.) want their R&D money back, so if you want to be first, you pay. I won't be first, but I'll probably have one before they become common place.

    --
  • I just love it when someone of "superior intelligence" has to insult someone who they think they're correcting, when in fact they're the ones who usually don't know wtf they're talking about. Stand-alone DVD support for CDRW disks is far above 50%, and I'd even venture to guess it's close to 80-90%. CDR, on the other hand, is supported by far fewer standalone players. The laser in a standalone DVD player is very compatible with the type of dye used in CDRW disks, but very few have a laser that can read the dye used in CDR disks. A quick search of the list of CDRW-compatible players at VCDHelp.com [vcdhelp.com] reveals 387 players that can read a CDRW.

  • I don't think the iDVD software works with any other drive. Which, unfortunately, ties in with the other point of too many competing DVD standards that are going to kill each other off.

    I'm not so sure this is a competing standards problem. I'm betting that Apple has only included drivers for the superdrive, because that's the only drive they sell. I'll bet Apple would be willing to work with Lacie, QPS, etc. to get iDVD working on those also.. Keep in mind that Disk Burner only works (as shipped) with the CD-R drives that Apple ships. However, if you install Toast on you machine, Disk Burner can write to any CD-R that Toast supports.

  • Might I also suggest .shn, which is what is used by the etree [etree.org] crowd.

  • Get a mac and use the G4 SuperDrive....
  • Dear Creative Labs:

    I would like to have a disk drive that is artifically intelligent, can do my dishes, teach me calculus, pleasure me sexually, and take out the trash for me.

    -Thank you,
    this Slashdot article.
  • Sony (I believe..) makes a MiniDV drive with IEEE-1394 that fits into a pc drive bay. They also produce another one that is small, but dosn't fit in a drive bay. Unfortunatly I can't find a link to it, but I saw it in the latest B&H Photo Video [bhphotovideo.com] catalog, but not on there web site. That would solve the capture to PC, while still using the camera to shoot more footage.

  • Re:All this exists...but DVD-RAM ain't it. (Score:3)

    by frankie ( 91710 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @11:29AM (#215512) Journal
    DVD-RAM specifically is a brain-dead standard.

    Well, a dead standard, at least. For example, PowerMacs had DVD-RAM drives two years ago [apple-history.com], and even Mac addicts panned it because DVD-RAM can't play back on consumer DVD players. That's where the money is.

  • Digital Betacam, on the other hand, is still in use.

    So is Beta SP. Beta is not dead in the broadcast industry. It's still the mostly used standard. (Especially since Sony is some of the most active in the broadcast industry.) Even when we're moving over to the digital age, Beta is still there with... like you said... Digital Betcam. And the nice thing about Beta SP is the quality doesn't degrade as fast as VHS.


    --
    Neafevoc

  • and anywhere that you can get packages delivered from there.
  • VCD is MPEG-1... fair quality and about 74 mins of video on a CD-R

    The article here is talking about putting DVD MPEG-2 video on CD-R, which gives you about 20 minutes. How this post got a score of 2 is beyond me...
  • It's the rest of us who don't want to buy or rent movies.


  • Call me a lazy slob, but I've got email files stretching back for 10 years now that still sit on disk.

    They're just plain old ASCII files with RFC-822 headers. The binary attachments that have grown popular in the last 5 years or so are probably getting rusty, I'll admit.

    I figured out a while back that it was less hassle to just let my disk use grow than to back things up on tapes. Let's see, what the heck is on this old 8mm Exabyte cartride, where's the tape drive (if it's still even around - the 1/4" QIC drives went the way of the 1600 bpi reels), where's the temporary staging area on disk tthat I can put everything, so I can finally run a grep or glimpse to find whatever it was that I was looking for about 4 hours ago...

    The upshot is that my disk usage demands have grown over time. So, while a 20 MB user area on a 200 MB disk was fine in 1986, I now need about 1000 times as much to feel comfortable. Moore's Law gave a doubling time of 18 months for CPU speed, IIRC, so my disk usage is running right on the same schedule.

    Exatrapoliting, in 2015, I'll feel comfortable with a 20 TB user area...

    Granted, some email messages haven't been accessed in years, so having millisecond latency and 1e2 MB/sec BW to get to them is wasteful in some sense, but, staging my data with hierarchal storage systems is too inconvenient.

    If only you could buy "disks" in a full spectrum of sizes and seek times and BW for any given amount of money, the situation would be a lot better.

    So, if I can plonk down $100 for a 20 GB disk with IDE ATA-100 performance, then I would ideally be able to get a 200 GB random access device with roughly "IDE/10" performance for $100.

    Hmmm...those email messages have probably run around the spindle about 2.5e9 times by now...

  • 1: Apple's G4 can be ordered with a "Superdrive" that will do CD-Rom, CD-WR, DVD-Rom, DVD-R.

    so what? My Mac LCII already has a superdrive!
  • I beeive that Apple's drive can only be used to burn movies using Apple's own software. You couldn't use it to say, back up your hard drive, or store MP3s on. I'm not 100% sure of this though.
    =\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\= \=\=\=\=\

  • DVD does NOT = Video (Score:3)

    by BradleyUffner ( 103496 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @11:08AM (#215520) Homepage
    A DVD disk does not need to contain video data, it can store just plain old data, like a term paper, or games. The DVD video thing is sut one format of DVD that the movie industry controlls right now. The DVD medium it's self isn't controlled by anyone really. Saying the movie industry controlls DVDs is like saying the music industry controlls CDs.
    =\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\ =\=\=\
  • it was the first to offer adult entertainment.

    It's true; pr0n helps media - see also the internet and the printing press (yes, people in the olden days were pervs too).

  • How does this Hot Swap IDE tray works? I mean, you do need the software on Windows and Linux to get HDs to swap out. Who is the manufacturer? What is his web site? I am curious and would like to know more. I have IDE racks, but there are not hot swapable.
  • Hah, whatever. Proof?

    --
  • This product appears to be vaporware. Although the press release is all over the Web, the Pinnacle Systems product page [pinnaclesys.com] doesn't list the product. (This seems to be the right Pinnacle Systems. Several companies use that name, but this is the one that sells video capture boards and editing tools.)

    Great idea, though. I've wanted that for some time. It's great for people who create short animation or commercial work, and need to distribute cheap copies. No more dealing with the VHS duplication facility and suffering the generation loss. I hope someone does this.

  • MPEG and MJPEG are two different compressions. MPEGs contain motion based compression as well as standard frame compression, which is responsible for artifacts which you will sometimes get while jumping around in an mpeg, while MJPEG is more like an uncompressed avi, with a lot of jpeg images simply appended to the previous.

    I haven't studied this in a while so take the above with a grain of salt.
    Want some indy electronic (and other) music?

  • The article here is talking about putting DVD MPEG-2 video on CD-R

    Which is called SVCD, or Super Video Compact Disc [vcdhelper.com]. It holds 40 to 80 minutes of MPEG level 2 video at 480x480 and MP2 audio on a CD-R disc. A few DVD players [vcdhelp.com] and most recent x86 PCs [vcdhelper.com] can play SVCD.

  • I haven't found any way to keep CAD files up to date for even five years

    Why not get (or make) a filter that converts CAD files to the XML-based SVG format [w3.org]?

  • VHS beat beta because it was more open (Score:5)

    by yerricde ( 125198 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @01:09PM (#215528) Homepage Journal

    Why did VHS survive over beta?

    Two major factors to adoption of a standard include open licensing and first post. DOS and Windows became a standard because they were more open than the Macintosh and UNIX® systems of the time and because Windows had a half-usable GUI before any of the popular Free Software operating systems did. There wasn't much difference between VHS's reproduction quality and Betamax's on consumer TV sets; instead, VHS beat Betamax [urbanlegends.com] because of VHS's longer capacity (timeshifting HBO anyone?) and because it was the first to offer adult entertainment [google.com].

    Digital Betacam, on the other hand, is still in use.

  • Who gives a rats ass? (Score:4)

    by Enonu ( 129798 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @10:42AM (#215529)
    Double density CD-RWs, DVD-R, DVD-RAM. Bah. All of still doesn't compare to the vaporware that I've seen previously posted here on Slashdot. Where's that 140GB FMD-ROM drive? Where's the storage device that uses media in the shape of a cube and holds 1TB or more of data? Isn't secondary storage supposed to be larger and slower than my primary drive? I say stop all development on this tiddly 10GB crap and shoot for the stars. After all, after pr0n, mp3s, DivX DVD rips, and a shitload of anime, my 75GB IBM drive doesn't cut it any more.
  • The MPAA may not be able to own tracks and data, but they may well have enough clout to make sure that writable DVDs never get widespread marketing until they have "appropriate content protection" measures built-in. If that happens to screw everyone over who wants to do home movies or back up computer data......oops.

    Just look at the DAT drives and media crowding the shelves for an example.

    It's not about technical capability or elegance.
    It's not about right or wrong.
    It's only marginally about legality
    It's ALL about keeping all the marbles in their own sandbox.
  • MPEG stands for "Moving Pictures Experts Group" - here's the official page if you're interested: Moving Pictures Experts Group [cselt.it]
  • the Superdrive cannot read or write to DVD-RAM discs, but according to Apple's site: "Software for writing data to a DVD-R disc is not provided by Apple, but third-party software is available. Search the Macintosh Product Guide for options." So it's a "write-once" deal if you want to backup your harddrive or write other data.

  • IDE == fast; IDE == cheap (Score:3)

    by Fat Lenny ( 150637 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @10:39AM (#215535) Homepage
    Where's the problem? IDE Hard drives are bigger, faster and cheaper. Spend an extra fifty bucks for hot swap IDE [aberdeeninc.com], or get a RAID controller for $75 and stripe up a 300+ GB array if you don't need to transport your files anywhere. Granted, that's not permanent, but recordable discs aren't exactly permanent or much less volatile, either.

    --

  • DVD's are just a fad!! (Score:3)

    by FortKnox ( 169099 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @11:14AM (#215539) Homepage Journal
    I'm sticking with my reliable 5.25" floppies.

    Sure you laugh now, but I'll be laughing when the DVD fad dies (just like the CDROM, and 3.5" floppy fads!)!!!
  • Of course, we'd all be derelict if Apple's DVD burning solution [apple.com] wasn't mentioned. It can burn DVDs after encoding (done in software, it takes 2x the length of the material), which can then be played in almost all normal set-top DVD players. Very cool!
  • You are an idiot.

    1. The MPAA basically owns the DVD technology.

     The MPAA doesn't own DVD technology. The DVD Consortion does. The give you permision to use the fancy DVD logo.

    To use DVD technology, you have to be licensed. ie - DVD players need to have a key to unlock the DVD contents

     No... See answer above. There is no key structure for DVD data. That refers to CSS only.

    The MPAA wouldn't like Panasonic (or any other company) very much if they sold a product that could mass-produce DVDs.

    The drive has firmware the disables a bit for bit copy.

    4. Panasonic probably was threatened into dicontinuing anything of that nature. ie - don't produce that drive or we won't give you anymore keys to make DVD RAM drives with.

    You totally made that up.
    I can't belive you are moderated to a 4
    To join a mail list for REAL dvd spec/tech related info
    http://www.tully.com/dvdlist [tully.com]


    Greg.
    http://www.ie-entertainment.com [ie-entertainment.com]

  • This is actually not new; most DVD players can play "Video CD" discs, which are simply CD-R media with MPEG video encoded on it. The lower data density of a CD-R means much less video, but it's still possible. Toast 5 Titanium [roxio.com] also offers VCD burning.
  • What about the people that won't have broadband for another 5-10 yrs (where I live, and no I am not moving). Optical storage is still useful, they just aren't as useful to you.

    Jaysyn

  • You haven't see Hironimo's (don't know who he is really) DVD rips of Farscape episodes. They're excellent quality, and are around 330MB for a ~45 minute video. They are the best I have ever seen. They also play nicely on my relatively slow K6 2-400 system which is jumpy for half of the other DivX's I sample. Anyone know where I can get a guide on what settings he uses?
  • As others have pointed out, these are different standards. One (MJPEG) basically compresses individual frames and the other (MPEG) compresses across a flexible series of frames. What hasn't been pointed out, however, is that they are sadly incompatible.

    Both are lossy high-compression standards that introduce their own different artifacts into the video stream, meaning that to re-encode MPEG as MJPEG (rare) or to re-encode MJPEG as low-bitrate MPEG for a DVD player (common), you'll get a multiplying effect as all of the artifacts that were nearly invisible to the naked eye in the source stream are suddenly enhanced and magnified as the video stream is re-compressed, especially in high-detail or high-motion segments.

    Even worse, because of all the extra "detail" the second encoder sees in the artifacts generated by the first encode, the second compression pass isn't nearly as efficient, using more space for frames that are individually worse in appearance.

    Try this. Start with a low-resolution (720x480) photo of high detail and save it as a JPEG at 20% quality. The .JPG version of the original photo has some detectible artifacts, but is likely passable. Now, re-save the .JPG version as a JPEG file again using 20% quality. The second JPEG looks much worse while there has been no compression gain. In fact, the second save will likely use up more space than the first. The effect when encoding MJPEG->MPEG or MPEG->MJPEG is similar, but occurs across multiple frames.

    It would be nice if MPEG-2 encoders would drop in price to the point that they could be directly included in camcorders. Footage captured this way could then be directly dumped to media for playback on MPEG-2 players like DVD players without any loss in quality.

  • I don't even care about ripping movies all that much, I'm mainly concerned with getting that amount of space cheaper. The more common it gets, the cheaper the drives and the disks will get. I've been going through spindles of CDs like tissue paper on a bad diarrhea day.

  • One possibility... (Score:5)

    by Drakula ( 222725 ) <tolliver&ieee,org> on Thursday May 17, 2001 @10:26AM (#215564) Homepage Journal
    is that manufacturers are waiting to see how the next generation blue semiconductor lasers pan out before they settle and/or continue with a particular. The shorter wavelength provided by these laser would afford many times more storage on disks of the same physical size. This application has been one of the main driving forces for production of blue semiconductor lasers and since the 100,000 hr mark (minimum requirement of industry for home application semiconductor lasers)has been reached companies have begun to make prototype equipment utilizing these things.
  • Remember that DVD-Video is MPEG2, and DV is not. (DV is more closely related to a series of JPEG frames)

    Hm, I thought that MPEG stood for "Motion JPEG" and JPEG stood for "Joint Photographic Experts Group." This sounds like MPEGs and JPEGs are quite similar. Could someone wise clarify this or tell where da info is?

    --

  • There are those ufortunates who bought low quality drives, who will have the msot problems. DVD-RAM seems vary (more so than CD-RW) sensitive to Drive quality. I'm not certain what aspect of drive quality is most important though. It's not just write speed anymore, that's for sure.

    WARNING: Slight, but abrupt topic change:

    Hey, doe anyone know when SUN is coming out with support for booting off of DVDs? All their new systems ship with DVD drives now, and yet, their OS is still shipped on large quantities of CDs. Aparently it would require a firmwate update. Does anyone know the timeframe sfor such an update?

    --CTH

    --
  • One word: Portability
    For example, If you want to take a huge project you've been working on to a friend. Should you unplug your computer, open it, up take out the hardisk and then reverse the process at your friends just because hardisks has more storage space, or just burn it on a DVD?

    Hardisks are meant to stay (most of the time) in your computer, While DVD is supposed to be a mobile format.
  • We bought a DVD writer about a year ago with the intention of using it to backup critical files for archiving, with optical media being so much more stable than magnetic tape or disks. Unfortunately, it has been almost impossible to get any media. Score one for the movie industry. Lord knows they don't want me backing up my databases.....
  • I worked for a company involved in the DVD business and I've got some hot news: Panasonic will soon release a new DVD/DVD-R/DVD-RAM IDE combo drive, for .... $200! Obviously medias are still expansive and not large enough for a complete DVD, but still.

    I don't have a release date yet, because it seems that the Panasonic executives are uncertain: releasing a drive so useful at such a cheap price would cut the market for their own present drives, much more expansive. Plus they'd like to stay friends with their Hollywood buddies.
  • If FMDs [wirednews.com] ever come out [slashdot.org] we could store much more data, and possibly even emulate DVD, since FMDs have several layers to DVD's two.
  • As I said, the big problem with relying on hard drives for backup is that a virus could rip through the whole network. Linux boxes are a little safer, two different OS's make it quite a lot safer, but not 100%. If a Windows virus is systematically eating .JPG files (for example), then a Linux server is probably safe from infection, but the .JPG files stored on it's networked drives can still be destroyed. A non-networked drive or partition on the Linux box would be safe, except that if you run a script that backs up changed files from the networked drive to the back-up drive before you know the files have been damaged...

  • Re:Optical storage has lost its purpose (Score:5)

    by markmoss ( 301064 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @12:43PM (#215587)
    Hard drives always die sooner or later, usually when you need them most. If you only want to keep your data a few months, then hard drive storage is fine. For 2 or 3 years, duplicating it on two hard drives is usually OK -- but we once lost thousands of JPEG pictures of our manufacturing process to a virus. If you want the data to actually be _safe_, then you've got to have off-line copies -- and it's best to have some of the copies stored somewhere else. If you want to have it ten years from now, then write-once media is a big plus, you need off-line copies that don't lose data with time (floppy disks start losing data in about 8 years, tapes will die sooner without special treatment to keep them from getting brittle), you need to somehow ensure that ten years from now you'll still have a drive that will physically read the media, drivers that understand the format, and for many files you will need an obsolete computer that can run the software to read the data. Many optical formats claim decades of readable life, but only a very popular non-proprietary format will give you a chance of finding a drive in 10 years. CD-R meets that requirement nicely, and because it uses an operating-system independent format, computers in 2011 will still be able to find the files, but it's too damn small. DVD*R* at around 10X the size is a little small, but it would be the best chance we have if they ever settle on a format.

    Whether your computer will be able to understand the files depends: I certainly wouldn't count on Word 2011 reading a Word 2000 document, but ASCII will still be around. Databases can be saved in ASCII; you might have to reconstruct the relations and forms to move to new software, but it's a lot better than looking through 10,000 pages of printout to find the cost basis of that piece of equipment... JPEG, MPEG, and HTML will have a good chance of working in backwards compatible viewers. PDF may or may not last. I haven't found any way to keep CAD files up to date for even five years other than continually paying for program updates and transferring all the files to each new version...
  • I think you're underestimating DVDs. I don't know exactly what model of B&O TV you were watching, but I'm willing to bet that the problem wasn't the DVD. Many stores do not correctly adjust the video settings of TV's, which can very easily exaggerate any flaws in a DVD movie. I have a 55" HDTV which displays next to NO compression artifacts on any reasonably high quality DVD transfer.

    You would think that stores would get their video settings correct, but frequently the sales people don't know how to do it-- the contrast is too high, the colors too intense, the brightness too high, etc. Granted the bright lights of stores aren't the best TV watching environments...

  • This is no big deal, they're basically talking about VCD (Video CD) burning. Roxio and Nero can do that, too. A really good reference site is www.vcdhelp.com [vcdhelp.com] that tries to explain the ins and outs of the various media. The problem is that not all home DVD players can read these disks. I've been trying to create VCDs from my miniDV input for a few days now, without any success. *sigh*
    -----------------

  • Optical storage has lost its purpose (Score:3)

    by screwballicus ( 313964 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @11:11AM (#215592)
    When I got my first CD-ROM, it blew me away. I had a brand new 486SX-33 with a 200MB drive. That 200MB drive was nicely complimented by a 650MB ROM drive. At 3.25 times the size of my hard drive, CD-ROM was an invaluable medium. Now, my main box has 200GB of storage. Why the hell do I need a DVD medium only a few times larger than my 486's optical storage? Am I going to back up my HDs on 308 CDs? How about double-sided, dual layer DVDs? That's still 13 disks. The existence of the internet, itself, is making optical storage worthless. I can download any Linux distro. Why would I need a disk, from which to install it. Encyclopedias and image/media libraries used to be bought and stored on optical media, but the web's a vastly superior medium now.

    If there's a way to make optical drives what they originally were (3.5 times the size of the largest hard drive available), then more power to the manufacturers, but 80GB drives are old news and 240GB optical disks seem unlikely for the moment (and don't tell me about any of these silly vapourware utopian optical storage solutions Slashdot has harped on in the past).

  • Um...Why would they be pointing at only LINUX users? Windows users can rip DVDs just as well as you can. Also, what is the basis for the "Oh, look at that lot of software pirates." argument? Why would anyone be pirating Linux software? Every peice of software that I feel is worth anything exists on the Windows platform.

    Besides writable DVDs have been out for years now. Try and get some facts straight.
  • OK, a little information:

    Pioneer is releasing a consumer-level DVD-R [pioneerelectronics.com] this month. You can get it for about $800 [videoguys.com] once it's out.

    The fact is, DVD-RAM is not taking off because, simply, it requires a ~$500 drive and is not compatible with DVD, and the average person does not need 5GB of removable storage.

    miniDVD is a great idea -- DVD-quality MPEG2 video on a CD-R, but few DVD players are compatible [vcdhelp.com]. So even if you make that awesome miniDVD, chances are good that whomever you send it to can't play it in their DVD player (although any computer fast enough to decode the MPEG2 can).

    VCD is a cool format (basically a special format of disc with MPEG1 video), and probably 2/3 of DVD players support it, but they are a pain to author, take a long time to encode, and quality is poor (VHS-quality at best).

    SVCD is nice quality (not as good as DVD, but definitely better than VHS), but has far less compatibility than VCD in consumer DVD players. Then there's XVCD and XSVCD, a couple of esoteric formats that hardly work on any DVD players.

    The final analysis: DVD-R is going to be big, not because it is necessarily the "best", but because it crosses over from computers to consumer electronics, has a large installed base of compatible hardware, and is suitable for a wide variety of tasks, which it will perform very well (data storage, video, etc). Just wait until the DVD-R MP3 players are out...
    -----------------------
  • the movie industry still has a good foothold.
    Much as people like to tote DivX, it is NOT EVEN CLOSE to DVD quality.
    Put in all sorts of different specs, high cost, discontinued lines and a little paprika: We have a casserole of "WTF".
    Human nature to try and hold onto monopolies, I suppose, though it makes me wonder what our best tecchies are up to in countering it. (besides cracking encryption codes :op)

  • Re:DVD-RAM needs a standard bad (Score:3)

    by Tyler-Durden255 ( 447448 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @10:51AM (#215614)
    What don't you understand about DVD-RAM and what is non standard about it?? It is almost exactly like a big 5 1/2" floppy There is single density single sided (2.6GB) Single desnity double sided (5.2GB) Double density double sided (4.7GB) Double density Double Sided (9.4GB) You can format the disks anyway you want, and write anything you want on them, pretty simple. It's just like a giant floppy, I love mine. However if you want to make a disk that playes in a dvd player you have to format it UDF, and properly encode the video, Then once the disk is written break it out of it's cart. it should play in any DVD level 3 player (anything made decently in the last 2 years) The trouble comes in explaining to people how to do this. It also comes in mearly explaining all the other DVD standards, DVD-R(Genral), RW, DVD-R(Authoring).
  • Macs are really getting high into DVD Authoring. The latest G4's come with the "SuperDrive" which im sure most people know is a DVD/CD-RW drive. Another company to look at is QPS-Inc (http://www.qps-inc.com) they have which will burn DVD's through firewire and they have a Guide for authoring DVD's. They have some of the beset products i know of and the support is really really good. Who knows maybe they would have some more info as well.

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