Real capacity of dvd-r's

[banditeer]

Hi all

Just got a Pioneer 105 burner and having a few teething problems.

How many mb can you actually fit on a dvd-r? I believe I am right in thinking that 4.7gb does not equal 4700mb??

I have tried using some Bulkpaq discs, which are supposed to work at 2x, but don't so far, and also don't like any amount over 4gb. Will a better quality media, like say the traxdata, give me closer to full capacity of the disc?

Cheers

banditeer

[epo]

Real capacity of DVD-R is 4 700 000 000 bytes (in reality something very close to this number) ie 4500 (4482) MB. There is no sizewise difference between brands. But there may be difference, how much is playable or even recordable due to inaccuracy in manufacturing process. You can't tell it tough, untill Your recording or playback has reached bad area.

[solarfox]

The reason that 4.7Gb does not actually mean 4700Mb is because the DVD-R manufacturers are calculating "gigabyte" as "1,000,000,000 bytes", instead of its (IMO) proper value of 1,073,741,824. (If a Kilobyte is 1024 bytes, and a Megabyte is 1024Kb -- 1,048,576 bytes -- then a Gigabyte should properly be 1024Mb, or 1,073,741,824.)

Hard-drive makers have been doing this for years, mostly because they can inflate the advertised size of the drive that way. The true capacity of a 4.7Gb DVD-R disc, in real terms, is about 4.33Gb.