How hard would it be..

[bartman]

At the moment we have a mishmash of recordable DVD formats available to us everyday consumers. I've read various papers and propaganda from the different camps ( the + and the - ) and have come to the conclusion that there is no reason why a DVD-R/RW couldn't write to a +R/RW disk or vice versa.

Before everyone starts to argue about this let me say that this is a THEORETICAL posibility. Both types of disk spin in the same direction, have the same capacity and use the same wavelength laser (650 nanometer) to burn the information. The difference is in the firmware and logical format of the disks.

Could it therefore be possible that all those people out there with flash upgradeable DVD burners, one day be able to download an upgrade to enable them to use whatever disk they liked? This way the clear winner will be the format that has the most compatability with standalone players.

I don't care what anyone says or what companies claim is better. I want to be able to make my own choice without needing to purchace or otherwise gain access to seperate pieces of hardware that essentially do the same thing. All the + and - bickering will only end up hurting the percentage of consumers that bought into the format that will eventually lose.

I'm not too sure if anyone else has made a post like this one....If they have...sorry for the duplication.

[vitualis]

It may be technically possible but probably not politically.

I wouldn't hold my breath.

Regards.

[bartman]

I agree that the probability of Pioneer or HP releasing an all-in-one firmware patch is next to nill.....however I have seen a bit of a firmware hacking culture with DVD rom drives making them region free and other such things.....It could be possible to hack the firmware of various drives to make them "+R compatable" or something given the hardware specs of a burner (chips used, API's etc). Theoretically all it needs to know is how to read the disk and how it is formatted...

I'm not going to be holding my breath for anything though

[vitualis]

It is unlikely that existing drives contain the hardware necessary to write to the other media type.

Such a drive could probably be created, but I doubt it would be without some big breakthough of co-operation between the two commercial camps.

Regards.

[Greg12]

It's very very easy,

just not politcally possible.

[RAAGAAman]

Not possible with Existing drives. Case in point the First Generation DVD+RW drive. It had to have additional H/W to write reliably to +R. Also, +R/RW has a higher Wobble groove thus you would need additional H/W to be able to detect it and write reliably. These are just two limitations that come to my mind. I am sure there are others. BTW, DVD+R and DVD-R do not have the same size limit. You can get about 8MB more on a DVD-R disk. Of course 8MB is not much in the big picture.

RG