Need advice on a DVD burner
 

Anyone with any thoughts about buying an installing a DVD burner? Specifically, Im thinking recommended brands, DVD-R or +R, and such.


Also, I have a canopus card. Does it export MPEG-2 automatically, or do I need another piece of hardware or software for that?

Thanks,

Eddie

I swear by my 2 Pionner A04. The new A05 is out (4x) and I have seen it under $300. Sony makes a drive that does +r/RW and -R/RW, but it is slow on the -R/RW side. Seme people like +r/RW they say it is more compatabile, I don't find that to be the case. Also +r/RW media is still a bit more than -R/RW. Pioneer sells a ton of DVD-R/RW drives, they are standard in some Macs, the Apple Super Drive is the Pionner. I'm getting ready to buy 2 A05 drives and am building a DVD duplicator that will have 4 DVD-R/RW drives in it. This way at 2X I can turn out 8 DVDs an hour, in theory. I woudl say Pioneer has the largest market, just by looking at all the places that claim Pioneer compatability.

There's an excellent article in DV magazine on compatibility aspects of burned DVDs. They tested players, formats, and media brands to see what combination had the least compatibility problems. Pioneer even qotes the results in their latest advertising. For instance, there's tremendous variabilty just in the brand of discs you might buy. Here's the link--it's worth reading.

http://www.dv.com/features/features_item.jhtml?category=Archive&LookupId=/xml/feature/2002/labarge0702

For what it's worth I also have a Pioneer A04 and am quite satisfied.

Also try using the searching feature up above to the right. There
have been a number of DVD burner discussion in the last couple
of months here!

I am very happy with my Pioneers. I have two A03's and two A05's. Zero problems.

jeff

Here's another vote for the Pioneer DVD burners - very reliable and free of problems (unless you count that firmware upgrade issue a while back, but even then they did provide the update on their website and alerted people of the issue).