Store on hard-drive or DVD?

[Deisel Weisel]

Want to get into making and selling DVD’s. All legit, my own copyrighted material. Now I’ve never made a DVD, so not sure exactly of all the process’ involved. However, the situation will be customers ordering from an archive of about 200 DVD’s, and I’ll burn customer orders as and when they come in – yes it’s low volume, otherwise I’d knock out mutiples. Now should I invest in say two 400gb hard drives to store these, or just keep them on DVD? Is it an easy process to ‘rip’ from an existing DVD, and then duplicate, or would it be that much easier with every thing stored on hard-drive?

(I know even less about DVD RAM, but can invest in a RAM writer, if that's going to make any odds)

[mats.hogberg]

I'd store them on HDD in ISO format, and write out to disc with DVDDecrypter or ImgBurn as needed.

/Mats

[jdizzy40]

Your real problem will be media and customer hardware (Their DVD Player). You might get alot of returns.

[solarfox]

I agree with mats.hogberg -- store them as ISO images on a hard drive. (I, personally, prefer to store my finished projects on an external USB2/Firewire drive, just because I don't generally need to run off copies all that often.) Keeping them on DVD-R would probably work just as well, especially if you keep 2 or 3 archive copies, but when you go to burn a copy it'll be slower to read the data from a DVD-R master than from a hard drive.

(Note, by the way, that strictly speaking you don't need to 'rip' from a DVD-R, because the information isn't encrypted. You can just drag-and-drop files from it like any other disc.)

jdizzy40 makes a decent point about compatibility, but based on my own experience in selling self-produced material on DVD-R, there's some things you can do to minimize potential problems:

(1) Use only top-end media, such as Taiyo Yuden, purchased from a trusted professional media-supply vendor. (I buy from CDR Planet, myself.) Do not trust off-the-shelf brands (Memorex, Fuji, etc.), and especially do not trust bargain-basement house brands like GQ, KHypermedia, etc.

(2) If you can, try to keep the size of your burns < 4Gb. Usually, the closer you get to the outer edge of the disc, the more likely you are to have playback problems.

(3) I strongly recommend using inkjet-printable media over stick-on labels. While my own DVD players never seemed to care, I've had far fewer problems with my discs not working on other people's equipment since I switched over.

(4) While most modern players can handle both types equally well, DVD-R (dash-R) still has a better chance of working on older players than DVD+R. (Nether format has 100% compatibility, to be sure; some players won't take either kind.)

(5) Avoid dual-layer. Its compatibility stinks.

[mats.hogberg]

(2) If you can, try to keep the size of your burns < 4Gb. Usually, the closer you get to the outer edge of the disc, the more likely you are to have playback problems.

Amen! That trick (I'd even dare to say <4.2 GB) allows me to use any cheap disc I find for my personal backups.
If I was going to do business, I'd be more conservative, and use both 1st grade media and keep well out of the outer edge.

/Mats