Hmm I'm a bit confused. I'm thinking of buying a DVD ROM to go with my new DVD player. The average price seems to be between $150 and $250. I've just been looking around though and I keep seeing DVD-ROMs for about $50. What is the difference - why are some so much cheaper...do they only play instead of record?

Do you have any example products? Its hard to take a guess when we don't even know what you are referring to

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

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http://www.goto.dealtime.co.uk/...n_id-3006360/GS.html

Interesting. I'm assuming you are referring to;

Liteon 16x48 IDE Internal DVD -OEM

If so, can't you only get that with a PC? OEm stuff normally only goes with new PC's...

Cheers

Andy (mod)
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That's one's a read-only DVD drive.

Note the drive speed. Only two numbers there. The third, the writing speed, isn't there.

- wil

I'm sure rules vary, but some places I've seen in the past simply require a second pc component to be purchased at the same time.

Liteon is supposed to be very good. I've got a $50 16x LG model that's pretty decent though.

Philip
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I won't arguee with you Andrew...cos you work in a computer store

Andy (mod)
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Hehe I decided the best thing to do was go and have a snoop around pc world.

I ended up buying a sweet little thing

It is a DVD-ROM and CD Writer combined.

It comes with:

WinDVD
WinProducer
NERO Burning ROM
AHEAD InCD
1 x CD-R
1 x CD-RW
1 x DVD-R
1 x DVD-RW

How much did that set you back? I found when upgrading to a DVD drive, it was best to keep my old CD-RW drive, and then just add another DVD drive; rather than getting a DVD/CD-RW combo

Andy (mod)
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It was £200. They said on top of the £200 I could pay £65 for a 3 year guarantee....I bit too steep so I got them to reduce it to £35 with a bit of bartering so if it goes kaput within 3 years I get it replaced free.

Now I have to figure out what to do with my CR-RW - may sell it to a mate or my dad :)

LOL...just be sure to get enough to pay for the insurance, so then, in a sense, you get 3 years insurance free

Andy (mod)
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Yeah, two drives are usually better than a combo as the writing speeds on the CD-R and DVD-R* will be faster if in independent drives, or so is the case on the Mac G4s and their superdrives.

- wil

Mmm how silly.

I downloaded a movie to test the DVD ROM with and it has 3 settings which are Good Quality, Better Quality and Best Quality. The DVD discs are 4.7GB and a normal movie set at best quality is over 5GB and won't fit on the bloody disc. I have to use "better" or "good" and then the quality isn't great

Wow. The DVD movies, full-length, perfect dvd quality I have on my system are about 700mb each. Hm.

- wil

They aren't DVD quality. If you are talking about files on your pc then they will be avi or mpeg.

DVD discs are purposely 4.7GB in size as that is about the normal size of a dvd movie. The mpeg I downloaded is 650MB in size but after encoding into dvd format it is 4GB.

Wil,

I think Paul is right. I have many DVD movies which, even though they don't take up all the 4.7 (or 9.2 GB), they are much larger than 1 CD. This is because they are still VOB files, and once you compress them (there is some loss in quality).

I'll admit I have seen movies at 600-800 Mb which are quick good indeed, and it would be difficult to pick the difference from afar. But if you sit next to the screen you can usually see the compression at work. Much like a jpeg at high compression compared to a gif.

Just my expereince with it.

Paul: good move! I found backing up my machines a dream with a DVD burner, it saves so much more time, and DVD's are really not that expensive any more (here at least).

I'm about to cry ;(

I bought 5 blank DVD's yesterday for about $40 and one out of the five worked successfully. For the other four neoDVD said "Error writing to disc" ....*after* it had already written something, so now those four discs are useless.

Eeek! I feel for you Paul.

I bought 5 dvd's from Apple, for $20 something bucks and the first two failed, but they replaced the whole box no questions asked (they couriered out the replacement box at no charge).

Give them a try. I have bought a gazillion DVDs from them since then and have not had an error since (they must be using higher quality now).

Do you think it is the dvd's?

...my first reaction was that the original mpeg was probably corrupt or something? ...although having said that it seemed to create the VOB file successfully before writing

My first guess would be yes, but:

Try viewing the contents of your DVD. If you can copy and view the file contents then the DVD may be OK.

Did you get a warrently with the DVDs?

Yeah I can view the movie in mpeg/avi format on my hard drive.

Warranty...mm not that I know of, I just bought them off the shelf. My DVD ROM has a 3 year warranty but the discs don't.

If it was the DVD's though why would one work but four not?

USD 20 for five disks is way to expensive. If you shop around a bit, you'll find 50 disks for maybe 60-70 dollars. Then it also doesn't hurt so much if the recording fails...

Ivan
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Yes, there are some good deal for qty. I have been buying 5 or so at a time (no shipping), as I like the idea of getting replacements for disk which turn out to be dud.

I agree though, it pays to always shop around.

Maybe I'm too paranoid but I always go for slightly more expensive ones as I have it in my mind that cheap ones will be crap.

I also go for jewel cased ones though which does hurt the wallet a bit.

I used to find really good deals at jungle.com but they are offline for a redesign :(

No, I am of the same opintion as you. The apple ones I bought were jewel cased, and they tend to stay less scratched than putting them into wallets this way. Personal choice I suppose.

jungle.com.... i've not been there!