Dvd to Dvd copying...

[tsantsa]

OK, I'd like to get a dvd burner.

1) I am thinking about getting the Sony 500A because it burns both formats...any thoughts about this buy?

2) I already have a cd burner (Lite On 52x48x52) and a 16x dvd rom...should I uninstall one of the drives or run the burner in with my hard drive (or one of the other drives)?

3) What is better- rip to image on HD then to DVD or straight rom to burner burning? And does either method have any video quality differences?


I am sort of leaning toward taking out the DVD drive I currently have installed and just ripping to HD and then back to burner but I can't quite find the answeres in the forum...I HAVE looked so I just thought I would post a quick query here.

Thanks for the help.

[simmons3d]

1) A good burner, people seem pretty happy with them

2)If you have enough slots, run them all with your dvd burner as the slave to your dvd reader. If not enough room, I would get rid of the CD-RW, since the Sony can burn CD's, and keep the dvd reader as long as it can rip quickly (8-12x)

3)Always rip to the hard drive first, then compress using one of the tools (if its over 4.5 gigs) or just burn it.

Have fun!

[tjtoed]

What about getting an external drive?

[tsantsa]

What about getting an external drive?

$$$ is a factor here...

So if I should rip to HD first, then why not get rid of mythe dvd rom instead of the lite on cdrw? The cd burner is an excellent choice as it is valuable in backing up copy protected games...

[simmons3d]

I'm not an expert on the latest sony 500A firmware, but you will likely only be able to rip dvd's to your HD at 2x maximum. That will take around 30-40 mins, whereas a 16x reader can do the same thing in under 10 mins.

The Sony burns cd-r(w) as well, albeit slower than 52x. But really, at 16x a cd burns in 5 mins anyway.

I have both a cd burner and dvd burner - since cd burners are so cheap I figured it would take the wear load off the dvd burner not doing cd-r's. If you've got the slots, use 'em all.

[thxkid]

My brother has 4 computers, one set up just as a PVR recorder for dishnet so buying the SONY 50UL was smart for him and it works great on all the computers, yes bucks is a factor he paid $449 for his and $399 is about the cheapiest I have seen the 500UL Sony, but USB\firewire drives has always been more exspenive, even the CD writers are about twice the price for an external to an internal one. So nothing new here about price.

[Faustus]

I have no idea what ports you have but I have seen Firewire cases you can add the drive to for as low as $65, my Pioneer works great in it. And that way I dont disrupt my daily use drives such at my Liteon 40x CDR or Liteon DVDrom.

[jdizzy40]

Number one reason why you want to keep the DVD ROM, in the tower or in a external box. Its faster for stripping files and it take the wear and tear off your expensive DVD burner like a few others said. Belkin makes a nice USB box that you can put your DVD rom in if you are out of IDE slots or don't have or want to buy a controller card. Guess you don't have RAID on the motherboard? Compusa carries the belkin box, nice looking and has a fan in back plus on-offf switch. I bought two, put a Sony DVD-ROM in one and Toshiba in the other one. Takes all of ten minutes to accomplish. Yes you have to rip to your hardrive and compress after. If I need to make another back-up copy of a DVD that i Have backed up I use NEODVD. It has a nice copy program much like Instant Copy but a little faster, around 20 minutes on my P-4 2.8. Good luck!

[txpharoah]

You can only do DVD-DVD copying on-the-fly if the source is not CSS protected (i.e., also a homemade disc).

[garywilk]

I have a Sony 500A and have only one complaint about it: Yes, rips are artificially limited to 2X (DVD). There is no reason for this other than Sony wanting to discourage people from doing exactly what you're wanting to do, back up commercial DVDs. But as one other poster had suggested, I also have a Lite-On 163D DVD-ROM for ripping which doesn't have the artificial limitation that the Sony does. Lite-On seems to be popular and has a good reputation. They're sometimes packaged and sold under the name "BusLink" at Best Buy and places like that, but once they're installed their ID string shows up as Lite-On. And since they are popular there's also some "aftermarket" firmware available for them that deals with various "limitations" in the stock firmware. Do a little googling and you'll see what I mean. (Trying to follow forum rules...)

There's also some confusion about the multipliers on DVDs vs. CDs (1X, 2X, etc.). Native speed (1X) of a CD is about 150k/sec. Native DVD speed is about 1350k/sec., or roughly 9 times faster than a CD. So a 1x DVD speed is around 9x CD speed.

I mention this because someone else had suggested using a USB external box for drives. Using USB 1.1 (the original standard) I've never seen a CD drive that burns over 6x CD rate. This is slower than even the 1x DVD rate, so I doubt an external USB 1.1 box could sustain the data rate necessary to burn a DVD even if you were willing to settle for using the slower 1x DVD speed.

USB 2.0 or firewire should support the data rates that DVD burning or fast ripping requires and I saw one poster said he'd had good luck with using external boxes. Perhaps the boxes (and OS support) have improved since I last tried it, but I've had some serious compatibility problems with external firewire boxes in the past, both with a Sony Spressa CD burner that was purchased as an already assembled firewire unit and an aftermarket box that I installed an IDE CD drive in. If you have the space and the limited technical knowledge it requires to open a computer case, the best method is still an internal installation. Yes, it limits the drive to one computer, but it's the easiest and most reliable method. There's a bit of a learning curve to creating video DVDs, and especially learning to back up DVDs. You don't need any extra layers of complication.

I also noticed someone mentioned avoiding the use of their burner for ripping to extend the life of the burner. I don't know how much ripping or burning he's doing, but in all my years of computer experience I can't remember ever wearing out a drive before it became obsolete. I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but I think you'd have to running the drive almost constantly to wear it out.

But if you are worried about the life of your drive, I'd be more concerned about jarring it around in a portable external box than wearing it out. As you might guess, all optical drives and especially DVD drives operate under some very tight opto-mechanical tolerances internally. Remember, we're talking about a laser beam small enough to burn four and a half gigs of data onto a disk you can hold in your hand. Common sense tells you the fewer jostles that the drive has to endure the less chance for misalignment of some critical component. Sticking your nice new expensive DVD burner in an external enclosure and then dragging it from machine to machine sounds like an invitation to trouble.

As far as backing up DVDs, it's far more practical to first rip them to the hard drive and then create the backup disk. There are several reasons for this. The first that comes to mind is that once the files are on the hard disk you can decide what you want to keep and what you are willing to discard. Commercial DVDs are typically dual-layered whereas DVD-Rs are and will continue to be, for the foreseeable future, single layer. That means that you're going to either have to A) reduce the bit-rate of the original data and/or B) discard some of the extras like the trailers, making-of featurette, etc. or C) split it onto two disks. None of this is practical when copying on the fly. Another factor to consider is the cost of the blanks. The last spindle of blank CDs I bought wound up being about three cents a piece after rebates and such. If I make a coaster out of one of those I don't shed a tear over it. But the cheapest DVD blanks you can buy are still around a dollar each. You don't want to be making a bunch of coasters out of DVD blanks and having the structure on your hard drive where you can test it first before actually making a burn will save you some expensive grief down the road.

Which brings us to another good point about the Sony combo drive. Each of the two competing DVD formats, plus (DVD+R/RW) and dash (DVD-R/RW) has their proponents as well as their pros and cons. The rewritable DVD+RWs can burn at 2.4x whereas the rewritable DVD-RWs only burn at 1x. But the write-once DVD-Rs tend to be about 30-50% cheaper than write-once DVD+Rs. Therefore, what I've taken to doing is using the DVD+RWs for making test disks and once I'm satisfied with the test disk I burn a write-once DVD-R.

And if you buy the Sony 500, make sure you download and update the firmware to the latest revision. Among other things, the updated firmware adds support for lots more blank media from different manufacturers. For instance, before the firmware update my Sony 500 would only burn Ritek media reliably at 1x, but after the update I've made no coasters burning them at 2x.

Finally (yes, I'm almost done...) be PATIENT and realistic about your expectations. Creating or backing up a DVD isn't usually like working with music CDs where you can put the source disk in one drive, the blank in the other, and just hit the copy button. Yes, I've heard of DVD XCopy which purports to do this, but I've also read of people having widely varying luck with it. And anytime you're trying to do the equivalent of shrinking two disks onto one you're going to have some choices to make. I'd rather make the choices myself than let some automated "training wheels" program make them for me.

Good luck.

[tsantsa]

Ok...lots of good info from all of you, thanks.

Now...I DO have one connection on my ide cables. That's the one that goes exclusively to the HD...Should I put the cd burner, the dvd rom or the dvd burner onto that one or do the extra controller card part?

And I do understand that copying a dvd isnt much like burning an audio cd, but my hope is that in the near future it will become easier.

Finally I am all about quality...If i copy an discs for my backups I would rather go the 2 disc route or as opposed to cutting the quality of my video or audio...Well on second thought, cutting out extra features like the trailer and other useless things like that may be an option! My final question is this: When I rip to HD and then burn to DVD will I lose any quality at all?

[M.AD]

You have the same CD burner as me

I am also thinking of getting a DVD burner, but plan on keeping my CD burner because it burns much faster than my planned DVD burner.

Incidently, the burner I am thinking of getting is a Panasonic SW 9581-C (stats - http://www.blankdiscshop.co.uk/acatalog/SVP_Communications_Special_Offers_15.html) £150 plus 25 NanYa DVD-R. Is this any good?

[tsantsa]

Also, if i were to take out the cd/rw and use the dvd rw as my primary cd burner...does the sony drive (or other brands for that matter) support all of the features of the Lite-on? (ie raw write, dao modes and the like)

[txpharoah]

I'm not sure about "artificial" read speeds. Most burners just have lower read speeds: read the manual and/or hardware specs.

Just buy a WRITER to WRITE and a READER to READ. It's easy.

[garywilk]

It's generally considered a bad idea to put an optical drive (CD/DVD) on the same IDE channel as your hard drive. There are a variety of technical reasons for this and if you're a true hardware geek (like me) you can find all the technical explanations at a variety of websites. Yes, it can work and you may have no trouble with it, but it does open the door to problems for many people. I build my own systems (surprise, surprise) and I use two 60 gig/7200 rpm drives on the motherboard's onboard RAID controller, the Lite-On reader on regular IDE channel 1 and the DRU500 on IDE channel 2, which means that each device has a dedicated controller. RAID isn't generally necessary for working with video, but it sure is nice. If you want to use two or more optical drives along with your hard drive I'd recommend adding a controller card.

"And I do understand that copying a dvd isnt much like burning an audio cd, but my hope is that in the near future it will become easier."

Well, to a tremendous degree it already has. I was an early adopter of the DRU500, buying one shortly after they became available in the U.S. The first backup I ever made was using IFOedit and TMPGenc, among other things. Prior to that I didn't know much more about DVD structure than that you put the shiny disk in the DVD player and watched the video come out on the monitor. I had no idea what VOB, IFO, and BUP files were or what any of them did. Even after I got some much needed knowledge and experience it still took me about six hours to copy a DVD and it was NOT AT ALL an automated process. Then along came some programs like DVD2One which automated much of the process and cut the time investment to less than an hour at the slight expense of losing some control over the process and MAYBE some quality. Even the purist in me has seen the value of doing things in the much less labor-intensive manner.

"Finally I am all about quality...If i copy an discs for my backups I would rather go the 2 disc route or as opposed to cutting the quality of my video or audio."

As I alluded earlier, using these automated programs has drawbacks. One is that they are designed for taking a dual layered DVD and fitting all the data on a single layer DVD-R, not splitting it over two disks. If you want to be absolutely sure that you're not losing any quality (or giving up any features) then you're largely back to doing it the manual way with IFOedit or something like that.

But every disk is different and people have widely varying degrees of sensitivity to compression artifacts. Keep in mind that nearly all digital video is compressed in one way or another anyway. The only video recorder I've ever seen that doesn't compress is the original D1 machines that cost about $140,000. Even digital betacam, the most commonly used professional format (and much more reasonable in price at somewhere around forty grand a pop), uses a farily shallow 1.6 to 1 compression. Raw D1 data runs at about 27 megabytes a second. Without compression your DVD would only hold a few minutes of data and wouldn't be able to transfer it fast enough for streaming to a monitor.

Perhaps I've strolled a bit too far down techno-geek lane, but I'm making a point here. When commercial DVDs are authored the compressionist (yes, that's a real job) figures their final project will be distributed on a dual layered 9 gig disk, sometimes even two for special titles with lots of extra features. Their goal is to stay within those constraints, so they don't have any reason to compress the video more than is necessary to make it fit. Some movies can withstand much more additional compression than what the original DVD author used and some can't.

This is where rewritable disks come in so handy. Play around with different methods and different titles. If you have a true eagle eye and can spot things like motion artifacts you may decide that you never want to try to reduce the original bitrate and make all your backups by splitting the content over two disks. But I'm willing to bet that most times you'd have a hard time telling the difference between the original disk and one that had the bitrate reduced by ten or twenty percent, even on a very high end monitor.

"When I rip to HD and then burn to DVD will I lose any quality at all?"

If you don't do any bit rate reduction, no - you're just moving data around. If you do bitrate reduction, either through one of the automated programs or manually with TMPGenc or something else, you MAY lose some quality. It depends on the source material and your senstivity to the data reduction. If you squeeze the air out of a sponge you still have all the sponge. If you accidentally cut off some of the sponge when you're squeezing the air out then the "quality" of the sponge may be reduced. The trick is finding out how much "air" you can squeeze out of the DVD without losing any noticeable amount of the "sponge." I, also, am all about quality, but I've found very few titles that suffer tremendously (if at all) from being reduced to fit on a single disk. On the other hand, the only way to be absolutely certain that you're not losing anything is to not do any bit rate reduction. You'll have to decide for yourself how much effort you want to expend to salvage something you may never see.

As far as the DRU500 vs. a dedicated CD burner, I no longer have a dedicated CD burner in my system. The DRU500 burns CDs at 16-24x which is fast enough for me. The faster the burn the more errors and compatibility problems that are likely. Audio purists won't burn at much over 4x, though I'm hard pressed to hear the difference. I burn all CD as disk at once (DAO) on the Sony so it obviously supports that. I can't honestly say I've ever investigated using the raw mode wtih it.

The DRU500 certainly does everything I need it to do and I love the fact that I'm not locked into a single format. The only format the machine doesn't handle is the odd-bird DVD-RAM disks. In various forums you'll see flame wars going on about the "+" format vs. the "-" format. I'm not sure which format will prevail or perhaps they will continue to co-exist. Perhaps DVD+Rs won't always be more expensive than -Rs. Perhaps DVD-RWs will come out that support at least 2x writing and the DRU500 can be flashed to support them. There are a lot of issues still up in the air about the DVD recordable formats and I like knowing that whatever happens I'm not going to wind up with a $350 paper weight.

[tsantsa]

Well you are quite informative gary!!! Thanks a bunch...I also built my comp and am quite proud of that fact. Don't think that I am just stupid for asking all of these questions: I did the same thing for each individual component of said computer. I just don't want to end up 'with a $350 paperweight!' LOL

Would you by chance know of a good controller card if I go that route? I just want to keep my cdrw since I paid for it!

For the record:

AMD 2400+
Ati 9700
Soltek 75frn-L (should have gotten the raid)
Lite On cdrw 52x24x52 (bring on the copy protection!! )
Artec 16x Dvd-Rom
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz 5.1 surround
2x256 MB Corsair XMS series Ram

I probably didnt need the Santa Cruz, but I was having a little trouble with the onboard audio...Actually it works now(update driver) but since I paid for the Santa Cruz I'm gonna use it!]


Thanks for all the help and it is much appreciated...now where to get a controller card...I'll look at newegg where i bought all of my stuff unless someone know of a better priced shop.

[garywilk]

Don't worry, I don't consider you stupid at all. It's the smart people that lurk, ask questions, and gather opinions before dropping several hundred dollars on a piece of equipment. I'm self-aware enough to realize that sometimes I get into more detail than really necessary, so it's difficult for me to strike the right balance between being helpful and burying someone in information they really don't need or care about, especially when I don't already know someone's level of expertise. I just find all this incredibly interesting and love discussing it with people. Glad to know I haven't scared you off. And like many people here I know a lot more than some and a lot less than others. And also like most people, when I first started learning about DVD authoring and such I felt REALLY stooopid (stupid with three "o"s as we say around our house...) I've still got a lot to learn which is why I'm spending part of my Sunday perusing the message boards.

Nice setup btw.

Mine is:

The DRU500 and Lite-On DVD drives
Gigabyte GA7-VAXP motherboard
(on-board USB 2.0, RAID, firewire, etc.)
Athlon XP2200 proc.
A gig of PC2700
2 Maxtor 60 gig/7200 rpm drives striped for RAID 0 (speed)
Matrox G550 video card (more about that later)
Soundblaster Live Platinum
17" Iiyama Vision Master Pro monitor
(presently shopping for a good 21" CRT, also more later)
D-Link NIC connected to a broadband router and DSL
Altec Lansing satellite/sub speaker system A/B'd with a full size stereo
Microsoft Internet Pro keyboard (I really like having a nice kb)
MS Intellimouse Explorer (Also love the nice opto-mouse)
Epson Perfection 1200 scanner

Yes, I spend a disproportionate amount of my income on electronic goodies. And though my computer is the "flagship" of the family my wife and kids have systems not terribly inferior to mine, albeit sans the DVD burner and some of the other niceties.

Both my kids have ATI cards, my daughter the 7000 and my son (the gamer of the family) the 8500. I had originally bought the 8500 for myself as an upgrade from a Matrox G400 I was having some trouble with at the time. The G400 was one of the first reasonably priced video cards to support dual displays and had the capability of outputting composite/S-video on the second output, useful if you're doing video work. I happened on the 8500 on sale at a good price, but was never satisfied with the TV video output on the second channel. More noise than the Matrox and the Matrox filled the screen on the NTSC monitor whereas I could never get the ATI card to correctly paint the entire raster, even though I could get it closer by tweaking some of the advanced settings. ATI support being what it is (largely non-existant - the only replys I got to E-mails were automated and off-topic) I decided to go back to Matrox. ATI kicks Matrox's butt in 3D, but I'm not much into games and consider the video-centric functions far more important. Matrox has always been best in that area (unless you want to sink a few grand into a pro card).

Which brings us to another area, the monitor. I bought my daughter a really nice Samsung LCD flat panel with digital interface that mates beautifully to her ATI 7000 card. The monitor looks absolutely spectacular (especially through the DVI interface) and makes a nice small footprint on her somewhat limited desk area. It also pivots and includes pivoting software which is also really cool.

But LCDs are still a bad choice for critical color work and absolutely the wrong thing to use for video. Even the best LCDs still have color/contrast shift as you move off-axis, some worse than others. And while the color looks "good" (maybe even great), it isn't necessarily accurate.

As far as video, LCDs have an inherently slow refresh rate. They don't flicker, but all of them will smear moving video to varying degrees. Once again, if you're interested there's all kinds of data out there about the pros and cons of LCDs, but I've hit most of the high and low points.

For all their shortcomings, CRTs are still best for color accuracy and blow away LCDs for refresh rate, both of which make them the choice for digital photography or video work. I'm not saying it will always be this way, but it probably will be for at least the next few years. Just a little trip down techno-geek lane (what, we weren't there already?): Flat panel LCDs (not projectors) use a flourescent tube(s) to supply light to the screen matrix which either blocks or passes the light to varying degrees. Even a color-corrected/balanced flourescent tube still has a discontinuous spectrum (certain colors are just plain missing). It isn't something that jumps right out at you, but it's pretty obvious when you compare the two side by side.

I notice you mentioned NewEgg. All my experiences with them have been excellent and their prices are very competitive. I love it when a company comes along that proves really competitive prices don't have to come at the cost of poor service.

As far as add-on controller cards, the only one I've had experience with is a Promise Fastrack TX2000 RAID card I used before I got the VAXP with onboard RAID. Gotta say I felt a little stoopid (only 2 "o"s this time) for paying $100 for the TX2000 when not much later I got the VAXP from NewEgg for only about $20 more than the RAID card alone cost. Even a non-RAID controller card is probably going to cost $30-$50, though for awhile Maxtor was giving them away free with some of their new (at the time) ATA133 drives. The TX2000 can be used in non-RAID mode so it might be a good one to consider it if you want something you can use now just for extra IDE ports but can be used as a RAID controller in the future. But (and I know this probably isn't what you want to hear...) probably the best solution is to just get a new mobo with onboard RAID. If I had known then what I found out later that's what I would have done, but then hindsight is 20/20 isn't it? And just like the stand alone card, the onboard RAID controller on my VAXP can be used in non-RAID mode to just supply extra IDE channels if you don't want to use it in RAID mode. I think most motherboards with onboard RAID controllers are like that.

Anyway, glad to be of help. There were certainly plenty of people that helped me out when I was getting started, so I don't mind at all giving a little back. And a little tip of the hat to the guys that wrote the how-to's over at Doom9 - they are absolute gurus. I've been dinking with computers and earning money/making a living in television since the 70s, but nearly everything I know about DVD theory and authoring I learned by reading those guides (many many times, as it were). Not at all to dis the people here at DVDRH; I'm learning a lot here, too.