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I have yet to get a DVD burner, mainly because I keep hearing that there are incompatibility issues, or that your movie will only work on either a computer DVD drive, or only "some" DVD players, etc.
What I want to do is to be able to burn AN ENTIRE FEATURE onto a DVD, that someone can simply put into their home DVD player and play just like when they rent a DVD at the video store.
Anyone know which drives will, or will not do this?
Matt Pacini
I have a Pioneer drive (which ship in the Sony Vaio desktops, funnily enough, and the Apple G4/G5s). It burns DVD-R and DVD-RW, and I love it.
Earlier this year I made a batch of 30 three-disc sets (90 discs total) that were packed to the brim with shorts (about 2 hours worth) and sent them all over North America. The people had a mix of old and new DVD players. There weren't any problems, except for one that had a spec of dust on it before I burned it (which didn't screw up the whole disc, just made one small part hang). Out of 90 discs shipped, I only ended up with one coaster, and it was my fault, not the drive's.
It is still region encoded though, which means it will only play in Canada and the US. You are allowed to change the region 5 times before the firmware of the drive locks it forever.
Just a note: I had to burn these myself because it was such a strange sized run (30x3). For future projects, if I forsee a run of a couple hundred discs I will have it professionally done (on DVD, not DVD-R). It's relatively cheap, and all you have to do is send out a DVD-R to the reproduction company. The addition of professional printing and on-disc graphics make it a "real" product, and it will be more durable and reliable in the long run.
I use a Vaio with a Pioneer drive also. I've been doing wedding videos on the side for a little over a year, so far I've done about 20. Out of those 20, there were 3 customers who claimed that their DVD's played either just the first 10 minutes, or not at all. I don't know what the deal is, I don't think the media brand has anything to do with it, maybe ya just got to have a new player.
Corey
I would research stand alone burners. Like the pro decks from Tascam or Sony:
www.markertek.com
Possibly not exactly what you are looking for but the MAC Superdrives burns DVD-R disks that are reqion free and can be played on any region code (whatever code) player.
From iDVD help meny.
Guess it is a software/driver related issue only.
R
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">As far as I know Apple do not supply external "Superdrives". However, their software DVD Studio Pro 2 describes using external DVDburning devices so I guess any external DVD burner which hooks up to a MAC FW/USB will create DVDs with the same options as the buil in SD.Quote:
Originally posted by Matt Pacini:
Thanks for the info guys!
Also, do the Apple Superdrives happen to come as an external drive?
Maybe a USB or Firewire external Mac superdrive?
Matt Pacini
I am prety sure that the SDs are a default product form either Sony or another "known" manufacturer. If someone opens their MAC it is possible to fin out the model I guess.
Anyway I am pretty sure it is a software related setting only. My guess is that any DVD burner can create zone/code free DVDs of the setup software allows you to.
For reference: Apples list over standard DVD-R compatible DVD players.
http://www.apple.com/dvd/compatibility/
R
Thanks for the info guys!
jumar, which Pioneer deck do you have?
Also, do the Apple Superdrives happen to come as an external drive?
Maybe a USB or Firewire external Mac superdrive?
Matt Pacini
Hello,
I have used a Mac superdrive for a year and a half now, and have yet to find a DVD player that won't support the DVD-Rs. The amount of footage you can fit on the DVD-R depends on your bit rate, and you need like DVD Studio pro to manipulate that. Commercial DVDs are multilayered, as opposed to the DVD-Rs which are just one, so you won't get the same quality, but it can be watchable. Good luck.
You know, I'm glad you guys are on this topic because I am about to buy a DVD burner and I still can't figure out the difference between DVD+R and -R. It's obvious the DVD-R is better because the prices are much higher, but really what is the difference? Also, can you encode a decent looking (meaning almost no pixels) movie file into a DVD with TMPGEnc?
~M
As mentioned above, the Mac Superdrive is a Pioneer drive (or at least it was until recently).
Matt, I have a Pioneer 104 (in my Vaio). I've also done stuff on newer and older G4s at work (with the so-called "superdrive"), and they work fine on every DVD deck I've tested on. The older G4 (about a year old) had the 104 as well.
jumar, what software are you using with your Pioneer 104 drive?
This is my dilemma:
I'm mostly using a PC for video/audio stuff, although I do have a Mac G3 sitting around doing nothing (yet!).
Does any of this stuff run on a G3, and/or a PC?
Thanks everyone, this is helping tremendously!
Matt Pacini
Most of the stuff I've done has been with Ulead DVD Workshop. It's easy to use and quite powerful, but doesn't have things like alternate sound tracks and subtitles, if that's important to you. They have a downloadable trial. They also have a built in encoder, which I have used up until now (having learned more about encoding alternatives).
On Mac I've done a bit of stuff with DVD Studio Pro, which is far superior, but much more complex as well. I've only done very simple stuff for work though, so don't have as much experience as with Windows.
DVD Studio Pro should work on a G3. On Windows there are tons of other options, but I found DVD Workshop to be a good intermediate solution.