Sony DRU500a - Advice Please !

[FreddyDVD]

I'm thinking of buying a Sony DRU500a... Is it a good writer ?

My main use will be data backups from Hard Disk and creating backups of my DVDs.

Is it possible to copy a film from DVD to DVD -/+ R/RW on just 1 disk ?

Thanks

[penamty]

I do not own a DVD burner, but plan to do so in the near future so I have been doing some research, most of the comments regarding the Sony DRU500a are positive, and in fact I've decided to buy one as soon as I can find one (I live in Mexico).

As for DVD backups there is alot of information in this forum on that topic, but the short answer would be that if the original movie is 4.3Gb or less you can make a backup fairly easily on one DVD. for movies bigger than that you will have to split them or reencode them to a lower bit rate.

[donpedro]

Or get just movie from all that junk around it and it might fit into 1 disk.

I own Sony and it's great, but if price is somethink that is important to you, I saw very nice deals in US for either + or - only burners ($199 and even less). But I am not sure about quality these burners.

[dun4cheap]

I personally would not skimp on the burner. I love my Sony and I am very gald I purchased it through dell back in October. It gives you the spead, versatility and large buffer needed to burn dvds. As for burning copies of your DVDs to one disc, this usually can be done with most movies if you just rip the movie and a 1 or 2 of its audio streams. I prefer this method or atleast until softare is unleashed that will rip everything, re-encode and then set it up to burn for you onto 1 disc. However this is probably not going to happen for a little while but I am sure it will. As for now there are many faqs and howto's located on this page.

[BarryHL]

Hello I live in the UK and I have done some research on what DVD Burner to buy.

I came to the conclusion that the two best burners are the latest pioneer and sony ones.

On http://www.dabs.com the pioneer is about £200 and the sony is about £250.

I personally am going to buy the sony burner because I think an extra £50 so that it can burn +R(W) and -R(W) is worth it.

[FreddyDVD]

Cheers..

I live in the UK, and I'm currently looking around for the best deal !

I read that Sony has updated the firmware to support x4 writing, is it possible they could update it again to write even faster ?

Regards

[BarryHL]

I don't think so, the laser that they use is only capable of burning at 4x as far as I know.

The drive could always burn DVD-R at 4x, the firmware upgrade just made it possible to burn DVD+R at 4x too.

[FreddyDVD]

So is it worth waiting ! and seeing what new drives appear ???

How long does it take to burn a full disk @ x2 & x4 ?

[BarryHL]

No I don't think its worth waiting for a faster drive to appear, new drives come out all the time.

The rough time to burn a full dvd-+r are:

1x 60min
2x 30min
4x 15min

4x media is still expensive, I buy my media from http://www.blankdiscshop.co.uk and the rough prices for media there are:

1x £0.50 each
2x £1.00 each
4x £2.50 each

Hope this helps