Limitation of Pioneer DVR-A03

[JacquesN]

On Pioneer's website, the specs of the DVR-A03 burner say:

Write Support DVD-R (4.7 GB for General disc only*)

and:

This writer cannot write to either 3.95 GB or 4.7 GB media for DVD authoring

This points to some limitatation of the burner, but it is not clear to me what it is. Will it limit me in any way in putting my movies on DVD?

[kitty]

I am no expert but let me take a stab at it:

General discs means that you can write data to the disk - to include MPEG video that will play on the DVD-R compatible players. What you cannot do according to the DVD-R(W) founders is take a DVD-R and send it to a pressing plant and get commercial copies or encryption on these disks.

DVD authoring discs and recorders (which the A03 is not) will set the bits etc to allow for encryption and mastering into commercial disks.

It seems to be the way the DVD symposium members control who can & can't make discs.

Now the DVD+RW group went outside the DVD symposium to make their discs more compatible with players. There may or may not be restrictions on mastering these discs - check their web site.

Anyone want to clarify or correct this please do so. Da Kitty

[alkieman]

No you're pretty much correct Kitty.

DVD-Ra is the professional format designed for studios and authoring houses. It essentially replaces the DLT tapes that the majority of studios currently use. It does have extra features such as region coding and copy protection and can be used to directly create a master cutting disc for pressing plants.

DVD-Rg is the format designed for us home users and is designed to be compatible and cheap. It's not designed to support the master cutting format that professional production studios need to create commercial DVD video discs. It's only a matter of time however before professional mastering house accept DVD-Rg discs from us mere mortals in the same way we can now take CDroms to publishing houses to produce brochures etc designed on our home PCs.

When you hear people on this and other sites going about DVD-R its normally the general format we are talking about. You can safely ignore the DVD-Ra format. Also DVD-Ra blanks are hideously expensive so you wouldn't want it anyway.

DVD+RW is, like DVD-RW, not at all designed for professional studio use. Both of these two formats were designed for us consumers.