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Sony DVD +RW Burner

How hoopy can it be to burn your very own DVDs?

 Every so often there’s a technology comes along that screams out “Try Me”. Ages ago it was the CD Burner – having the ability to create (and copy, I suppose) CDs and CD ROMs looked to be the kind of facility that would interest an old muso and self-confessed computer geek like me. So it is with the DVD +RW Burner – Sony’s DRU110A, at 2.4x8x12x10x32 (DVD+RWxDVDxCD-RxCD-RWxCD) looks to be just what the doctor ordered in order to get those of a technical mind burning DVDs that will read on a relatively recent and low-cost standalone DVD player.

Indeed, it does just that, using relatively expensive media, granted, but it does give the facility to create a video DVD and play it on your telly, as it were.

Well and good – but what’s the process of creating the platter in the first place like? Well, as ever, it all comes down to the software.

Software

Sony’s shipped kit includes the quite naffly named MyDVD, which is an application for taking video streams and concerting them into DVD files. It also allows you to create the menuing system seen on commercial DVDs – handy, you’d say, for producing professional-looking compilations of your home movies, to my mind one of the primary reasons for getting hold of one of these drives in the first place.

The whole thing is wizard-driven and is, frankly, child’s play to get to grips with. The only possible source of confusion would be in terms of some of the technical-sounding names of certain parts of the DVD itself. That, in itself, is as much of an RTFM problem as anything else, and a little judicious reading soon sorts it out.

Speed

My main bugbear – and there has to be one - is speed. While actually defining what’s going where on the DVD is simple enough, the actual assemble time is prodigiously slow, even on a 1.7GHz P4 equipped PC sporting a full gigabyte of RAM. MyDVD takes the raw digital Video footage and converts it to the DVD video format, which takes at least as long as it would take to watch the final DVD itself. In fact, it’s pretty much likely to be an overnight job for anyone with a PC sporting a sub-GHz processor. I, for one, had thought those days were past!

Not so with data, though – you can fill a DVD+RW rewritable disk with ordinary computer files in pretty speedy time.

So, it really comes down to what you’re going to want to use such a unit for. In my own case, it would have to be for archiving digital video footage into a format that’s accessible for daily use – in other words, creating my own DVDs to watch on the box. Using it as a backup mechanism for the PC isn’t really where it’s at, as far as I’m concerned. Systems with far greater data capacity, tape-based, are available more cheaply, and the traditionalist in me senses that’s the way to go for backup.

Portability of files is not that much of an issue, either, given that very few of the files most folk would need to shuffle about with them wouldn’t fit onto a CD, and the cost of either the media or the Burner for CD-R/W is really rather insignificant these days.

No, it’s as a device for creating DVDs to watch that I think this unit has to be considered, and, at this point, I’m not altogether convinced that the technology is mature enough to warrant serious consideration for the masses.

Value

At £374 (discounted, inc VAT), we’re talking a serious amount of money to lay out, and when you consider that blank +RW media retails at over a tenner a pop, we’re not talking small beer. Obviously, prices will come down – just as well – and my thinking is that once we’re talking sub £100 for the burner and sub £2 for the media, we’ll have something worth talking about. Until then, it’s quite possible to create a video CD which will play on that majority of domestic DVD players. Granted, the quality isn’t as good as you get from DVD, but assuming that the source material is of good quality, you can easily match VHS quality at playback.

On that basis, I can’t really recommend that you rush out and add a DVD +RW Burner to your setup at this point in time. There needs to be steps taken to minimise the time taken to do the required conversions from DV format to the DVD video format, and the price needs to drop. Once both of those have occurred, then I’d have no hesitation in recommending the Sony drive itself – it’s solid, and quick.

David Dorn

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