DVD Burner Comparison

mikemuch writes "While you're waiting for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, you may want to check out ExtremeTech's roundup of dual-layer DVD burners. Starting at about $43US, some of them are quite powerful, come with nice bundled software, and are pretty good deals, to boot."

Quality of the burns?

[Anonymous Coward]

One area the article completely ignores is the quality of the burns? They don't mention if they had any troubles playing back anything that was burned on these drives. Compatibility with existing dvd players is a big deal and it would have been nice to see some mention of this in the test. Having the ability to burn a dvd that only half of my friends/family can play twice as fast (or half the cost) is useless.

Speed, speed, speed...

[4of11]

Why do these kinds of reviews always focus on speed alone? Who cares if it takes a couple of minutes longer to burn a DVD with one drive versus another? It's not like you have to sit there with baited breath as the DVD burns -- you can do other things.

I'd rather see a comparison of noise or rate-of-coaster-production. I recently got a new DVD burner which works rather well as far as speed and reliability, but is way too noisy, even when I'm just playing a DVD with it. I have to use my old DVD-ROM drive for playback.

I guess its harder to test those things, though. You can't just load up some benchmark it let it run.

Re:Litescribe?

[Masami Eiri]

Overpriced media, really. Just use a sharpie.

Re:Speed, speed, speed...

[briancarnell]

And a drive compatiblity test. From my experience, compatibility with dual layer DVDs is much lower than with single layer DVDs when burning them yourself.

And Quality of media

[goombah99]

I'd also like to see a site reviewing the quality of media for CD-R and DVD-R. The thing I care about is not speed, but reliability. And the Media may affect that more than the burner itself. There's a wide variety of prices on media but nothing to really guide you on quality and longevity.

Over the long run the cost of the burner may be small compared to the cost of the media, so there's no big reason to scrimp on the burner price. But there's a big reason to scrimp on the media. Plus of course unreliable media may lose very valuable data. So it's important to understand reliability of media.

I can't find any discussions of this that are not terribly outdated. It seems like every manufarcturer is constantly changing media names and makes several different lines. (e.g. look at Ritek). But on-line stores don't offer enough information to discern what might make one better than the other. (e.g. info on dyes, or disk construction).

Anyone have some reasonably fresh or comprehensive discussions of this. Or list the names of DVD or CD-r you had reliability problems with. Were the problems Batch-like (e.g. if one CD in the cake-box was bad were many of them bad) or random?

Re:Linux

[BobNET]

Probably cause the chances that a DVD burner doesn't work in Linux (or any other OS) is pretty small these days; the drives are almost always MMC compliant [chalmers.se]. There might be a few features on the more expensive drives (e.g. Plextor with GigaRec, etc.) that aren't supported by burning software, but it'll almost certainly still burn DVDs, which is what it's supposed to do...