DVD recorders?

Slydice · 12-01-2001 11:36am #1

OK

I just want to know about them. Ive seen some on the market for about SG£300/350

Can you get re-writable DVD's. Can you recored your own films if you hav a webcam or a camcorder?

How much space altogether can a DVD hold?

_CreeD_ · 12-01-2001 5:02pm

Your piece of string is THIS long.

There are 2 formats really. The official DvD-Ram, which is not compatible with your normal DVD player. So recording movies and bunging them into your home cinema system is a no-no. You could link the PC with the DVD-Ram drive to your TV and just play the MPEG-2 file back as you would any other media on your PC.
DVD;s come in 4 flavours.
Single Sided - 4.7Gb
Single Sided Dual Layer - 8.7Gb
Double Sided - 9.4Gb
Double Sided, Dual Layer - 17.4Gb

AFAIK DVD-ram only comes as 5.2 and 8.7 (And this one is in a cartridge).
You can pick up the disks anywhere, even Tower records have them(or had a few months ago). But they're not as cost-effective as just using normal CDR's.
You could always backup your movies to MPEG4 instead and play them on a normal CD, with nay too much quality loss (Have a look a www.tomshardware.com for some relevant links on how to do this)

There is a newer 'un-official' (Ie. Hollywood don't like it). Called DVD Re-Writable. Same idea but this is aimed at letting you create disks that will work in any DVD drive. Last time I looked the burner was ~3000 quid. Dabs have one for sale if you're still interested, though I don't have a clue where you'd get the media.

There are handicams in development with DVD-Ram drives built in. I think the first one just appeared but it only has USB. You really want Firewire (Or USB2 when it appears later this year).

Choose Witches over Mermaids every time, 'cos Mermaids they don't fly....

[This message has been edited by _CreeD_ (edited 12-01-2001).]