DVD knowledge

I have just completed the first DVD of the final 5 and have some questions for you electronics guru's. I bought a new DVD player and the first disc made works perfectly! I am told however it may not work on all player. The plus and minus players are incompatible with DVD's done with the minus in a plus machine and visa-versa. In order to make DVD for people I am not sure how to approach this. I made the first DVD with a minus disk and the player I bought (Best Buy, 80.00 Sony) reads all types and will not be a problem. I have asked a couple of guys that wanted DVDs what type of format does their player reads and no one knew, which is predictable.
1.Question is how do you know what format your player uses?
2. Is there a way to get more time on a DVD, remembering that I am not more than a hack on a computer.
3. It took me 6 hours to render and make the disc in my editing software(Pinnacle Studio 8) after editing. Is this normal and is their a faster way?
Sorry for the none Stunt post but it is for Stunt.
RO

I am not an expert but have done a few DVD's.

Yes it takes that long and the only way to get more on is to lower the quality of the images. Not a good thing to do.

The most compatible format is -R as most of the older machines are this format and the newer ones will do both.

Check out this site for almost everything you wanted to know about DVD's.. http://www.videohelp.com/

What capture card did you get? I bought a Radeon All-In-Wonder 8500DV some time ago and have had good results. I use the software that came with the card (Video Studio) but I understand Pinnacle Studio is a good package.

LAST EDITED ON Jul-23-04 AT 12:18 PM (CDT)
 
As usual, Mr. Google knows more about the subject than I do.

But that never stopped me from offering some help. The chain of compatibility you are referring to ("plus" = DVD+R/RW while "minus" = DVD-R/RW) has to run through the drive used to burn the DVD, the media used to store the video and the drive used to play the burned disk back.

An explaination of the difference between DVD+R/RW and DVD-R/RW media types is at the Memorex site.

The first way to estimate what kind of media type a given player will play would be a notation to that effect either on the drive case or in the users manual (I know, I know...) of any given system.

The second way users could tell would be to download a 19 page compatibility chart in PDF format and look it up.

A third way would be to use the DVD Player compatibility web page to check for their player model.

The fourth and most reliable way is to put a sample disc in the target player and verify it.

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How much time you actually end up putting on your product depends upon your editing compiling capabilities, software and and how well the images you are saving compress. Here's a capacity list for various DVD and CD media formats. It takes about two gigabytes to store one hour of average video.

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If you want to edit render and burn faster, you have to increase one of two things: The maximum speed at which your drive will actually burn the new media and/or the speed at which your CPU/RAM/Software can encode the video. Anything greater than 1:1 encode/burn speed is a win for small home systems.

Once you have a master, a Disk Replicator system could churn out copies for you at a faster rate.

If they are compatible with your user's drives...

Cy

LAST EDITED ON Jul-23-04 AT 12:40 PM (CDT)
 
We frequently provide dvd dubs of video programs that run on the tv station I work for. Using -R media we have yet to encounter anyone who says they can't play the dvd they get from us. These are not computer created dvds however. They come from a Panasonic dvd recorder hooked up to a videotape player.

We continue to use -R simply because that's what initally came with the recorder. +R might work just fine too, but I didn't want to mess with a good thing.

As mentioned, it often takes a very long time to create dvds in computer drives. If you're thinking of doing numerous dvds it might be worth looking for a standalone dvd recorder (our super-store version was less than $350). Dubbing is real time, plus the few minutes after dubbing to finalize the dvd.

The instuctions for our Panasonic DMR-E50 list a variety of recording times for dvd-r media; 1, 2, 4, or 6 hours. We've only used the 2 hour mode.

Thanks guys. I have more info than I can absorb for a while. The web sites given are good info for me to search.
Thanks again!
RO

As far as I know, DVD players (as opposed to recorders) don't have "+" or "-" ratings on them. These apply only to recording media and to recorders (including recording drives in PCs).

Both formats are supposedly compatible with all players that can read recordable media (which is all recent ones - older ones might not be able to, just as very old audio CD players can't play CD-Rs). Before "+" came along, everything was "-", so I expect "-" will play in all recordable-media compatible players. I think "+" was an effort to produce an "editable" DVDR which was still compatible with existing players, but I've heard some players might have issues with them.

There's also DVD-RAM, which is incompatible with everything else..

LAST EDITED ON Jul-23-04 AT 08:56 PM (CDT)
 
I have been playing around with DVD burning for the last few months. What you need is a "DVD Authoring" software. There is many on the market. So far, I have only use a few and am not very happy with any of them. Some of them let you burn DVD's at different bit rate, therefore, it you burn at the lowest, it will bive you more time on the DVD. I've use HP Showtime and Producer 2, they both of pros and cons.

Do a google on "DVD Authoring Software" and you will find a bunch on info. Look inkto products from uLead,Sonic,Mediostream, Adobe, or Pinnacle.

Yes, it take a long time to make a DVD. The problem is not the burner, but its the Encoding from AVI (Raw video) to MP2 format. Some software are faster than others. If you want super fast MP2 encoding, then you need to buy a Video Capture Box that has MP2 decoder built-in. They usually cost about $200 - $500. I believe there is a box made by ADS called "DVD +DV"