Re: DVD / DVD+R /DVD-R / DVDRW. Are they all really distinct media formats?


"Rahul" <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Xns9AD2D4A1AAB546650A1FC0D7811DDBC81@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I'm always confused by DVD terminology when buying media to write on.
There's DVD / DVD+R / DVD-R / DVDRW and I'm not even sure which more!

Are these all really distinct technologies and formats? Or are some
subsets
/ supersets of others? Or maybe its only backward compatibility issues?
What's the best way to figure out what format my Laptop supports? Do they
have varied sizes? Does it matter whether I'm writing data or movies etc.?
I faintly remember there being lead-in / lead-out issues....

I've never faced the problem that I bought some commercial movie etc. on a
DVD and my Dell Laptop ( Inspirion E1505)'s inbuilt DVD reader /writer
couldn't read it. Its a dual boot so are there any Linux-vs-Win issues
too?

Are these distinctions only relevant when writing disks at home as opposed
to commercially stamped disks? Or maybe when reading on hardware other
than
"computers" (etc. DVD players etc.)



First: the easy bit. The 'R' media is write once. The 'RW' media can be
erased allowing its re-use.

A little more complex is the difference between the '-' discs and '+' discs.
As far as you the user is concerned, except for some uses there is little to
chose. Some older video DVD players will refuse to recognise the DVD+RW
discs (but will recognise DVD+R). This was the result of a deliberate
attempt by Toshiba to discourage the '+' format. Once rumbled they had to
abandon it.

For DVD-R and DVD+R, there is no practical difference other than the latter
is written faster by some drives.

For DVD-RW and DVD+RW there is a subtle difference in that the former is
eraseable at the block level only. The latter is eraseable at the word
level. This means that individual words can be erased and overwritten. It
also means that if used for video, more video can be added to the end of
existing video and the two played through seemlessly. This cannot be done
with the '-' format.

If you are planning on using packet incemental format (Nero's InCD or
Roxio's Drag-to-disc), then DVD+RW will be much more reliable than DVD-RW.

Every modern DVD writer supports all 4 types of disc. Some also support a
format known as DVD-RAM which works much like any normal disc drive. This
latter format is the only writeable DVD format that is supported by Windows
XP out of the box (but beware, DVD-RAM formatted by XP isn't fully
compatible with Vista).


.

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