M.I.5¾ wrote:
> "Rahul" <nospam@nospam.invalid> wrote in message
> news:Xns9AD2D4A1AAB546650A1FC0D7811DDBC81@207.46.2 48.16...
>> I'm always confused by DVD terminology when buying media to write on.
>> There's DVD / DVD+R / DVD-R / DVDRW and I'm not even sure which more!
>>
>> Are these all really distinct technologies and formats? Or are some
>> subsets
>> / supersets of others? Or maybe its only backward compatibility issues?
>> What's the best way to figure out what format my Laptop supports? Do they
>> have varied sizes? Does it matter whether I'm writing data or movies
>> etc.?
>> I faintly remember there being lead-in / lead-out issues....
>>
>> I've never faced the problem that I bought some commercial movie etc. on
>> a
>> DVD and my Dell Laptop ( Inspirion E1505)'s inbuilt DVD reader /writer
>> couldn't read it. Its a dual boot so are there any Linux-vs-Win issues
>> too?
>>
>> Are these distinctions only relevant when writing disks at home as
>> opposed
>> to commercially stamped disks? Or maybe when reading on hardware other
>> than
>> "computers" (etc. DVD players etc.)
>>
>>
>
> First: the easy bit. The 'R' media is write once. The 'RW' media can be
> erased allowing its re-use.
>
> A little more complex is the difference between the '-' discs and '+'
> discs.
> As far as you the user is concerned, except for some uses there is little
> to
> chose. Some older video DVD players will refuse to recognise the DVD+RW
> discs (but will recognise DVD+R). This was the result of a deliberate
> attempt by Toshiba to discourage the '+' format. Once rumbled they had to
> abandon it.
>
> For DVD-R and DVD+R, there is no practical difference other than the
> latter
> is written faster by some drives.
>
> For DVD-RW and DVD+RW there is a subtle difference in that the former is
> eraseable at the block level only. The latter is eraseable at the word
> level. This means that individual words can be erased and overwritten.
> It
> also means that if used for video, more video can be added to the end of
> existing video and the two played through seemlessly. This cannot be done
> with the '-' format.
>
> If you are planning on using packet incemental format (Nero's InCD or
> Roxio's Drag-to-disc), then DVD+RW will be much more reliable than DVD-RW.

Just out of curiosity, why is that? (I don't use the packet writing
format, but am curious, and would have expected the older standard to be
more compatible in this case, too - seems like (from a hardware viewpoint)
it might be "simpler" to just erase the whole block, rather than the
individual word - albeit less desireable for the user).

> Every modern DVD writer supports all 4 types of disc. Some also support a
> format known as DVD-RAM which works much like any normal disc drive. This
> latter format is the only writeable DVD format that is supported by
> Windows
> XP out of the box (but beware, DVD-RAM formatted by XP isn't fully
> compatible with Vista).