Burning DVDs/File Types

valtzy

Hey all. I wanted to burn some DVDs (scrubs) for a friend of mine and recently discovered that CDRW's are not, unfortunately, the same as DVDRW's and consequently do not hold the same amount of info. So, I'm wondering what are all these neat settings under my burner, such as EP and LP. It seems that EP allows me to fit a whole lot more under a DVD but what does it do for file-size/quality (let's say, 170 MB'ish videos).

Also, what kind of DVDRW's are there (size and such). There's a whole bunch of sizes and costs here and I'm wondering what some of you guys might use, cost-effective wise that is.

and if all else fails, is there some wonderful, non-abusable site where I could upload a file, let's say 170 MB'ish file for friend to download. rapidshare and putfile seem to be awfully lame at the moment.

thanks in advance.

MengerSponge

I do not have a DVD burner, but I believe that all discs are either about 4GB, or about 8.5GB for the dual layer discs (which you need a dual layer burner to burn, obviously.) I've found (at least with CD-R and CD-RW discs) that the RW's are not very good, and it's better to just get the one time use R's. When I tried CD-RWs years ago, they were very unreliable, and would only rewrite a couple times before I could no longer rewrite them (at best) or they died (at worst). As for the + and - formats, they're about the same as far as I know, and most drives now burn and read both, so pick whichever. I don't know which brands are thought to be the best.

The only way I can think of to transfer a file really easily, without having to pay for hosting, would be for you to download an FTP program (there are tons available for all OSs, so just look on Google for a decent free one). Set that up, share the videos that you want to give people, and give your friend the info so he can connect to your computer. This would allow him to download any files that you choose to share, directly from you.

Locust76

Well, it sounds like the EP/LP settings are actually going to convert your videos to MPEG2 and recompress them, so you should probably choose the higher quality setting or avoid the DVD recompression entirely.

Note that many DVD players will play DiVX encoded files, so you could simply copy the files over to a DVD R/RW disc and stick it in the player and go.

As far as the reliability of CD RW vs DVD RW, I believe they're based on the same technology, so their reliability would be similar. They can be rewritten something like a thousand times before becoming no good.

Unfortunately, we saw a format war between writeable DVD media, so you have DVD +R/+RW, DVD -R/-RW and DVD RAM. Most modern (made in the last year or two) DVD burners are multiformat, so it doesn't really matter. The only difference is compatibility and speed. "-" media is the most compatible, if I remember correctly.

So, in short, if your friend is going to be playing the videos on a DVD player, it would be worth it to investigate whether or not the files will work just burned straight onto the disc. You can test that using a CDRW and one or two video files, since a CDRW can hold at least 650MB. If he's going to be watching them on a computer, then you certainly don't have to worry about actually making a video DVD out of it and just burn them straight to DVD as a DVD-ROM disc type.

Hope that helps!