DVD recorders

[Tard]

Because of holiday sales, was interested in perhaps purchasing an inexpensive DVD recorder to transfer the bulk of unreleased VHS movies in my collection to a disc format. BUT, I don't know much of anything about recording formats...

Such as, what's the difference between DVD, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW, S-VCD, & VCD?

I have two players, one which only plays standard DVD's, though many of my movies are DVD-R's. The second player is able to handle the DVD-R's, but to my knowledge, have never tried playing any other format. Are any of the previously mentioned formats likely to be phased-out in the near future? (That could be like purchasing a new 8-track stereo-system in 1985!)

[Tard]

Like one on-sale model I've been looking at (around $250, though not sure how that translates to pounds) can playback all those formats, but can only record in DVD+R/+RW, S-VCD & VCD. How practical would that be?

[cash]

there are 2 main DVD formats the + and the -, i cant rememeber if its the - that plays in most DVDs or the +, i think its the plus. R means that you can only write it once, so if u fuck it up thats a disk in the bin. RW is ReWriteable so you can write as much as you want.

[belovedmonster]

why not go to http://www.dvdrhelp.com/ and ask there? They have shit loads of content aswell as very well populated message boards.

[Vlad the Impaler]

- is looking to me.. and after reading articles in certain places before I bought my dvd-r writer to be the most successful atm... this is probably because of the cheap writers and media available for them. However I read Empire the other day.. and their technology section says + (the phillips dvd writing standard) was popular more in europe and america.. while - (pioneer) was more popular in asia.

[anasazifilms]

I would recommend getting a POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE DVD-R device... so it does both formats... and plays both too.

I think they are slighty more expensive, but in the long run it would be better.

[Tard]

With all the holiday sales, was just looking for something cheap to put all my fave VHS upon for safe keeping. Teemu Maki has an incredibly difficult-to-describe video ('MY WAY, ver. 2.0'), 'WAX : or The Discovery Of Television Among The Bees' is another one I wouldn't mind placing on disc, along with 'The Secret Adventures Of Tom Thumb' claymation/live-action mix. Hell, there's a thousand more VHS tapes I'd like to preserve to disc rather than let the tapes degrade further...
A lotta shit that was once-in-a-lifetime too, like the 9/11 morning news, East-Coast USA Blackout of 2003, and the hilariously overhyped bombing at the '96 Olympics. Planned & scripted programs don't compare to live unscripted news broadcasts. [img]tongue.gif[/img]

<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ December 20, 2003 10:57 PM: Message edited by: reved ]</font>

[Alex]

You'll need a decent VHS playback machine that is equipped with a time-base corrector. Plus you should have a waveform/vectorscope.

Probably need an audio mixer also.

[jungleguy]

I've got the Pioneer DVD - , drive in my Mac, and I have no problems with the disc's I make from playing in friends DVD machine's.

I think you'd be beller of doing this through your PC. You'll be able to do DVD menu's, plus making multiple copies will bw quicker. Recording from an anologue machine will have to be done in real time, Once its all encrypted you'll be able to record on your PC at x4 speed.

Worth thinking about.

[sn-films]

The "DVD-R" format gets my vote everytime. I've been using an external Sony DRU500 for over a year now. I can make DVD-R(W) and DVD+R(W)... and I think it does the VCD and SVCD's too. I have never experienced problems playing back the "-" disks, but the "+" disks only seem to play back on certain machines.

As for the format being phased out... there are blue-light HiDef recorders out there, but I can't see them replacing the DVD format considering that video stores are currently spending a small fortune converting their libraries from VHS to DVD. I personally wouldn't get too emotionally invested with the VCD and S-VCD standards, though. If any of the formats go away, my guess would be those two, since I believe the only reason those formats were developed was allow people to put videos onto a disk with their existing CD-recorder instead of having to buy a DVD recorder. Now that the DVD recorders, and the media, are coming down in price, I can see those formats becoming more and more obsolete.