I did get a DVD burner, the Sony DRU-510A, which can read and write everything except DVD-RAM (since that comes in a cartridge, or at least old versions of the format did). There were some cheaper drives there, but they didn't go as fast. The burn speed for CDs is up to 24x, not the fastest out there (dedicated CD-ROM/CD-RW drives can go faster), but not bad—it's much nicer waiting just a little over 4 minutes for a disc to burn than to sit around for 20 minutes like with my old burner.
I wasn't quite sure what “up to 24x” meant until I burned a CD. A CD in your normal audio player will rotate at a variable speed—this is so the bits on the disc will come off at a constant rate. However, when CD-ROM drives get up into the higher speeds, they switch over to a constant angular velocity and read the bits off at a variable rate. At the inner edge of a CD-R, my drive goes around 16x, but gradually gets faster until it reaches the outer edge, where speeds are 24x (or maybe a tiny bit faster).
Now I have to find out if any software for Linux will work with DVD stuff.. I want to send home some discs with episodes of Monk for my brother and parents to watch, since it looks like ABC won't be running it this year.. I need to find something that will do MPEG4 to MPEG2 video transcoding, though.
Oh, before I forget, I had a really nice girl do checkout for me today. Actually, she did checkout twice for me today, since I forgot that I needed some CD-Rs, so I went back. I almost considered asking for her number or something, but I also got a copy of a Prodigy CD. When she saw that, she asked me if I'd ever seen the video for “Smack My Bitch Up,” so I figured it would be in bad taste to ask right then...
Posted by mike at July 5, 2003 03:51 PM | Family , Hardware , Software | TrackBack