Re: [OT] DVD Burners -- there are 2 ways to record in any OS ...

["Bryan J. Smith" <b.j.smith@ieee.org>]

On Mon, 2005-07-18 at 09:09 -0500, Kara Pritchard wrote:
> As far as "why" we stock those, it's because they've been very solid, no 
> matter what OS you're using.

And that's good.  But just know there are 2 ways to burn in any OS.

Sony/Philips +R/+RW drives (even if they also do -R/-RW) don't do one of
them.  There is a long history to why, but they never have full DVD-R
compatibility.  Jorg has added some "emulation" to CDRecord-ProDVD's
byte-by-byte (character) record for DVD+R/+RW drives, but it's not the
same as a true byte-by-byte (character) Disc-at-Once (DaO) to a DVD-R/-
RW firmware drive.

Long story short is that +R/+RW was designed for data, not player/
embedded compatibility.  That didn't come until late 2003, largely
because most players are now "intelligent" and can handle the physical
media differences.  I.e., if you read the +R/+RW docs out there,
including the dvd+rw-tools, they will always reference it as the same
"logical" organization.  "Logical" is the key phrase.

Only -R/-RW with DaO (which dvd+rw-tools downplays, wrongly IMHO, and
gets some other facts wrong) is the way to guarantee player and embedded
compatibility, physically.  Especially with pre-2004 models.  It's one
of the reasons HP, Sony and Philips have had litigation against them
(not delivering compatibility, support as expected, etc...) in the past.
There's even a much longer, and very political, history to that, but
it's not really relevant here.

> We have only had one RMA (knock on wood) in the past 2 years since
> we've been using that line of product.  We started using the
> Samsung/Toshiba drives as our primary model after the Lite-on 
> ones kept having problems.

I've never had good luck with Lite-on.  So I'll see you there.

I fairly certain Samsung has only make +R/+RW drives, along with HP and
most other Sony/Philips licensees.

As far as Toshiba, they make both -R/-RW (and even -RAM) firmware
drives, as well as +R/+RW firmware drives.  I assume you only stocked
the latter, but some of them might do all.

LG's GSA-408x and 416x series seems to have a winner in that they:  
A)  Support every format (DVD-R/-RW, +R/+RW, and even DVD-RAM)
B)  Support both DaO and more "logical" block recording/rewriting
    (as well as even 8 year-old DVD-RAM packet write in Linux ;-)

AnandTech found not only the performance outstanding at _both_ DVD-R and
DVD+R, but the error rates fairly competitive (except for one media
brand):  
  http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2470  


-- 
Bryan J. Smith                                     b.j.smith@ieee.org 
--------------------------------------------------------------------- 
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mentary concepts of limits, is mutually exclusive with US journalism.
So forget even attempting to explain how tax cuts work.  ;->



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