***Link Back ET 134 Webpage***THE KIM KOMANDO SHOW ELECTRONIC NEWSLETTER
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Issue Date: Nov. 30, 2002
Kim Komando Show Home Page: http://www.komando.com
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Kim Komando’s Weekly Column 11/30/02: Deciphering the DVD Muddle
The fanfare days of CD-RW are over. It is quickly being replaced by the Digital Video--or Versatile--Disk (DVD) for all the right reasons. For starters, it is a way to finally use a standard computer to create a DVD that contains movies and photos viewable by just about any home DVD player. Because of the size of video files, this wasn't very feasible with a CD.
While CDs top out at a mere 700 megabytes, DVDs can handle 4.7 gigabytes of data. In movie-speak, this translates to roughly 130 minutes. Some DVDs are double sided; they can store 9.4 GB.
Consider what this means to making important backups. Gone are the days of spanning data over a handful of CDs. Depending on the amount of data, one or two DVDs are all you'll need. But if you still want to burn and read CDs, you can. Most DVD recorders do this, too, albeit much more slowly than a CD-R or CD-RW drive.
Best of all, the prices of DVD recordable drives now dip into the $200 range, making them more affordable than ever. But all is not rosy in DVD-land. Make one trip to your favorite computer store and you see not only competing brands. There are competing formats, or standards, too. This phenomenon is not all that unusual in the computer industry.
It happened with 56K modems. And it happened with CD-R drives. Now, DVD equipment makers cannot seem to agree on standards. In fact, people can't even agree on what DVD means!
Despite it all, the DVD situation is relatively easy. The right DVD player depends on three things: whether you want the ability to save only once or many times per disc, what type of things you want to save on the disc and who you purchase your computer from.
Let's start with DVD-R and DVD+R drives. Both these drives will only allow you save or write the disc one time and are well-suited for video. If you are going to be making backup and video disks, and also want to burn CDs, look at the DVD-RW and +RW drives. These let you reuse discs. If you are going to be carrying your backups around and have no need to burn CDs, a DVD-RAM drive's discs are held in a cartridge and can be rewritten up to 100,000 times. If you're buying a computer instead of adding a drive to your current system, the type of drive you will get depends on who is selling you the computer. For example, while Dell and Hewlett-Packard use DVD+RW/R, Gateway and IBM offer DVD-RAM and DVD-R. Apple offers a DVD-R drive.Really, the only hard part of this nonsense is making sure your family room player will handle the disks you create. All players will run the movies you buy or rent. And many can handle DVD-R and DVD+R. Check the manufacturers' Web sites to be sure.
Both external and internal DVD recording units are available. The external units are pricier but are easier to install. Your burner will include the software you need to make DVDs and CDs.
If you get an external unit, its connection to the computer will be critical. You'll want to hook it up with Firewire or USB 2.0. Both move a massive amount of data quickly. That's important, because video files especially can be huge. If your computer doesn't have Firewire or USB 2.0 ports, you can install them with an add-in card. A card with either type of port should cost less than $50. There are also combination cards available.
When shopping, you'll see numbers like 2.4x/2.4x/8x. Those are the numbers for one-time recordable (-R or +R), re-writable (-RW or +RW) and read (ROM). You'll see the same arrangement on CD burners, but the numbers are not comparable. DVD-R runs from 1x (about 1.3 megabytes per second) to 4x. DVD+R runs up to 2.4MBps. In CD-ville, 1x is 150 kilobytes per second. So the DVD rate is approximately nine times that of a CD. Talk about fast!
The DVD muddle is about to get worse. Today's ruby laser will be supplanted by a blue laser, probably beginning next year. The blue laser will read two-sided disks with 40 to 50 GB of data. But there are two standards, and no agreement is in sight.