DVD purchase and writing

[jessejones]

Just out of curiousity, is buying a DVD writer worth the expense?

I would appreciate it if anyone who has one can post their experiences and let me know. What I am most interested in is, when you write the DVD to cd, is the quality DVD or less? Clarity, audio, etc.
Are you happy with the quality?
What DVD writing application are you using? (Ulead, Nero, etc)

Many thanks in advance

[rphunt]

It's a totally personal decision whether it is worth the expense. This site in general can give you a lot of info to help you make a decision.

If you use a decent MPEG2 encoder, then a good authoring tool, any videos that are important to you can be transferred to a DVD-/+R/W disc in a quality equivalent to the source material. And you gain the added benefit of menus with random access, and potentially longer life.

If you are talkng about VCD, that's different. Generally, the quality is slightly inferior to VHS. In some cases, that's fine.

I use The Dazzle DVC2 to encode, Ulead DVDWorkshop to author, and Nero to burn onto my HP DVD200i drive. I personally enjoy doing this, and plan on archiving a lot of material this way, onto DVD and VCD.

[jessejones]

thanks for the info rphunt. I really appreciate it.
Like a lot of people on these forums that are trying to get decent quality from encoder to vcd, svcd etc and are not having much luck. I am wonderin if I am wasting my time and should I just wait e for the DVD writers to come down in price.
For now I guess I'll just keep chuggin' away at it until I can pull together the dollars to buy the writer.
thanks again

[Faustus]

Personally I love mine... movies transfered from tape and dvd to dvd trasfers have added up to more then pay for the device itself...

Have fun