PC DVD Recorder/burner buying advice - please !?

[MegaTsunami]

Hi.

The time has come for me to replace the rarely used internal LiteOn DVD player on my PC with my first DVD burner / recorder / re-writer (whatever!).

I currently have a LiteOn 52 speed CD burner PLUS this separate DVD player.

So.......... any advice for a total newbie re: what to buy please ?

I don't know anything about all the formats DVD wise, all I know about is blank CDs (CD-Rs) and rewriteable ones (CD-RWs!!!!).

I have seen one on ebuyer for example and would appreciate genuine opinion please:



http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/produ...duct_uid=96691


I currently use Nero Burning ROM v5.5 for burning music CDs and mainly Video CDs, but guess I can't use that with a newly installed DVD burner???

Or can you use an older version of Nero with a newer one, i.e. keep v5.5 for the LiteOn CD burner etc and also have Nero 6 to just use with the new DVD burner ????

Also, fitting.....! Will it be a simple matter of uninstalling then unplugging the exisitng LiteOn DVD player drive and connecting up the new DVD burner ?!?!

My heads spinning over this but I know you lot are good, honest decent chaps

So, any advice will be most appreciated, thanks!
MT.

[centaur]

I've recently bought 2 lots of Pioneer DVD players/writers and an OE Nero 6 suite3 from Ebuyer. I am very pleased with all of them, particularly the Nero6 which was only about £5 whilst the DVR 111D was @ £30.
Don't know much about LG, but friends tell me they're generally ok.

The Nero 6 will burn cd's and DVD's and contains a DVD player too, you may need to uninstall the previous version....I never had one so can't say for certain.
I just removed the old cd drive and replaced it with the DVD RW drive, ensuring that the 'jumper plug' on the rear was in the same pin position as on the drive removed. Sometimes you might need to move it to the CS (cable sensed) pins to get it to work.

[Zer02004]

The Pioneers are good but I suspect that there's little difference between units of similar spec and price whatever the brand name.
Most of the units in existence are probably badged LG units as are most monitors and other equipment.

[MegaTsunami]

Thanks for the replies guys

I'm still totally confused over the different kind of discs available though... DVD-R, DVD+R etc etc

What does all that mean ?

Oh yeah, finally... any recommendations for the best brands ? I obviously wouldn't touch anything from my local £1 shop, but am unsure about proper brands, Sony... TDK.... Verbatim any good etc ?

[MegaTsunami]

Yikes, I knew there were a lot of DVD formats but this is scarey !!!

[MegaTsunami]

I take it different formats are suited to different media?

i.e. my girlfriend has started to scan in loads of her old family slides and film negatives in .TIF format (which are huge!) and she wants to "preserve" them burned onto a DVD and load them into Paint Shop Pro off a DVD (as we don't have much hard drive space left ) for editing, then resaving as JPGs for developing into prints.....

Whereas I would want the right type of DVD for burning downloaded TV shows - in .AVI format - onto, so I can watch them ASAP on my standalone DVD player (instead of decompressing them, extracting the audio, then converting them into MPEG with TMPG_Enc before finally burning them as a VideoCD with Nero !!!!!!). Phew !

[gem]

As you have found out, there are indeed a confusing array of DVD's.

Check out your DVD player - most players will play DVD-R. Some will play DVD-R and DVD+R, others will also play DVD-RAM (which acts much like a hard drive).

For PC's most will play DVD-R and DVD+R. A few will play DVD-RAM.

Then we have the re- record-ables (DVD-RW and DVD+RW) which I'd forget except for use on a PC for storing data (and adding data too) but I've found that they do not last as long as non-record-ables (record once).

I don't think I picked up from what you are recording TV to - I have a Panasonic DVD HD recorder and I transfer all wanted SKY+ recordings to the DVD recorder and then put them (and any wanted programmes recorded from Freeview on the DVD recorder) on to DVD's (DVD-R).

Hope that all helps Mega.

[MegaTsunami]

Hi, thanks for the reply.

Like I said above, my girlfriend is currently using a new scanner to scan in lots of old family slides and negatives, plus some newer ones at very high resolution to enable her to get ay least A4 size enlargements, (shes saving the scans as lossless TIF files, then editing them and eventually saving them as JPEGs for a photolab to enlarge etc etc). These TIFs take up a lot of hard drive space (plus all the JPEGS too). We can currently only get 10 TIFF files on a blank CD-R due to the 700Mb limit

We need a reliable DVD format to "archive" them onto, as this hard drive is getting full. What format of blank DVD do you recommend for photo/data storage please ?

And with me, I have the entire 5th season of (ahem) 12+12 (!!!!), downloaded in AVI format. How would I burn these to DVD to watch on our standalone DVD player connected to the TV ?!?! (when I have actually bought a PC DVD rewriter that is!!!)

I am currently using "AVI2VCD" to decompress the AVI file, then VirtualDubMod to extract the "audio stream" as a WAV file, then TMPGEnc to put the 2 files back together as an MPEG (with no out of sync audio issues!), which I then burn as a video CD with Nero 5.5, which we then watch on a non-PC DVD player, follow me ?

It's gonna take a long long time to do that for each episode..... thats why I need to know how to burn an AVI to a DVD disc !!!!

I yeah, I also use TMPGEnc to ensure that the correct "aspect ratio" is kept from the original AVI file (taken from a widescreen HDTV broadcast care of Azureus!), as theres nothing worse than a stretched picture