i know peter mentioned this here is some more info on verbatim...

http://www.emedialive.com/Articles/R...ArticleID=8506

One thing I'm curious about, and I don't mean to start advocating piracy but it's just an interesting topic I think, is whether this media will be useful for that purpose. Can you in fact copy a DL DVD, burn it to this DVD+R DL, and have it play just like the original? And if so, why is Hollywood not super upset by this? I wonder if the answer is, in fact, that you cannot, but if that is the case, how are we mortals to author DL DVDs of our own if it's not as simple as making a VIDEO_TS directory and throwing the files into it without regard to the layer break?

So many questions.

peter, 25 copies isn't nearly enuf to justify the cost of this new format... perhaps there are other aspects of your business model that could somehow benefit from higher media expenses and slower dupe times?

btw, ever hear the old saw about how you can tell who the pioneers are? just look for the guy with all the arrows sticking out of his back.

been there, done that, which is why i'm fud-mongering this new technology so hard :-)

Oh come on, you're just cynical. :) I have faith in Sony.

BTW may be you can find other DL drives are just annouced so it's really only the start for all that. You might be even better off wiating few weeks and read some reviews on the competition.
I'm not a Sony fan but copying shouldn't be issue. You have the right to copy your own DVDs and in the moment there are many utilities to do so. I'm sure that no long after wider publicity of the DL format you can do the same onto DL media.

Except the layer break is an issue. See when you get DVD-9s pressed, you have to give two DLTs and they specifically burn one glass master with layer 0 and the other with layer 1. The layer break is often carefully positioned to minimize viewing impact. Sometimes, even on DVD-9s, the movie is intentionally kept under 4.7 billion bytes so there's no layer break.

Point is, how will the burning software handle this? If you can make an 8.5 GB DVD project in, say, Adobe Encore, and then just burn the whole damn thing in Nero, that'd be one thing. But is special authoring software required to position the layer break just so the Sony drive knows where to put it? Does it have to be at the end of a VTS in order to work right? Etc. Unanswered questions. Potentrially, it may be difficult to back up existing DVDs, as well as difficult to author DVD-9 projects of our own. These are the main reasons I want to get my hands on a DVD+R DL so I can find all this out.

well, the good news is that the burner is cheap, at $199.

the bad news is that it's only giving a 43% compatability rate... i must be some kind of a mind reader... or perhaps it's all of those arrows sticking out of my back after all these years :-)

disc production won't ramp up until 2005, maybe sony will indeed get the bugs worked out of it by then... this review also talks about your layer break issue:

http://www.emedialive.com/Articles/R...ArticleID=8568

Yep it seems under 50% at the moment. And the discs haven't been playing in SL drives.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1596779,00.asp

Jake

Damn those are the first hard compatibility figures I've heard and that is indeed frustrating. I wish there was a way to know if they'd play in my DVD player at least. Hopefully there'lld be broad compatibility testing soon. I'd get it simply to have a reference for my DVD projects before replication, if for no other reason.

One thing, Sony advertises these discs as playing back in "most" consumer video players. 42% is not "most." That makes me quite ticked.

It's all a bit up in the air as you'd expect when things are still being finalised and very little testing has been done.

A guy gave a report that he was finding the DL was having about the same amount of compatibility as SL in most settop players but falling over when it came to ROM drives. I guess things will become clearer as time goes on!

Jake