Gadzinka's Journal: 8x DVD burners rock! I mean it ;)

I recently bought myself this cute little toy and I just have to tell everybody, how cool it is ;) It replaced my failing Toshiba 5002 x2 -R/-RW drive.

The recorder in question is NEC 2500A dash&plus recorder. I still don't have any 8x media, but I've just bought 30 TDK x4 -R and 1 Platinum x4 +RW. Man, how those numbers run, when you burn at x4 ;)

Couple of gotchas, though.

• When using cdrecord-ProDVD on Linux, you can neither blank=fast nor record image larger than already recorded on disc in case of DVD+RW discs. But growisofs from dvd+rw-tools handles this situation just fine.
• Well, so much for mastering dvd-videos using fake ``DVD-Video Booktype'' marker[*]. It seems that commands for writing on DVD+R/+RW the Booktype marker[*] are proprietary/secret/burn-after-reading and they are rev-engineered only for Benq and Ricoh drives, not for NEC or Pioneer :( Without it the dvd-video mastered +R/+RW disc will play in standalone dvd player only if the player in question is aware of plus discs. Pity, 'cause if you could lie to dvd player about the type of disc[*] the +R/+RW could have better compatibility grid than -R/-RW discs in existing players.

Go, buy yourself this toy! It costed me 530pln, which is about $130 -- cheaper than good brand CD recorders couple of years ago. I bought my first Toshiba 5002 for around $250 and still think it was worth it (and it worked only a year...).

Buy only brand name DVD-s though. I've been using some no-name or bad-name media at the beginning and lots of them are failing after only couple of months. Right now I am using Verbatim and TDK, moving slowly to TDK only.

I am wondering about Platinum DVD+R. I know they are Ricoh media and I've had only good experience with Platinum CD-R. And they're almost 2x cheaper than TDK or Verbatim. But DVD-s? If even Verbatim can still screw simple DVD-R x2 discs (had some failed after recording) then it means that the technology is still very young.

[*] normally there is information on dvd disc that basically tells player ``hi! I am stamped dvd-video disc!'' or ``hi! I am DVD-R disc!'' or ``hi! I am DVD+RW disc!'' etc.