DVD burner farm

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 12:07:29PM -0700, Adil Kodian wrote:
> One more thing of interest is that when you 'burn' a DVD it isnt really a
> DVD as you know it. It is a DVD-R with data or video on it. If youre
> interested in creating mass market 'video' DVDs then DVD-Rs are not the way
> to go - youll have customers complain that they cant view the movie in all
> players (since they are not using computers). Also - there is no way to
> write the universal dvd area code as DVD-Rs cannot be written at that disk
> location. Some players may not function without that set. To commercially
> make video-dvds the best option is to create a master and quickly punch out
> as many copies as you need - but this isnt a basement operation - you need a
> factory. This wont work on dual layer disks - but you dont have to worry,
> AFAIK no dvd player supports a dual layer disk anyway (except a few really
> high end ones - but then there are no movie releases on dual layer disk)

Almost all commercially made DVD videos are dual layer and have been for
years.  A single layer single sided DVD only holds 2.5hours, so you
figure how long the movie + extras take on many current releases and you
will see why they needed dual layer.  Also conviniently makes them much
harder to rip and copy to DVD-R since they won't fit without deleting
something and then you have to reindex everything and it's just a hasle.

Some early DVDs were single layer dual sided to cut costs (and since
dual layer manufacturing wasn't quite ready yet) but people generalyl
dislike not having a pretty label on the movie to make it easy to tell
which one it is (lethal weapon 4 for example has a 3mm label around the
inner ring and is a real pain to read.)  All DVD players must support
dual layer DVDs although I think some made in the first few months of
DVDs coming out may have had trouble reading them.  Certainly players
from 5 years ago had no such trouble (although many could not read CD-R
or CD-RW, never mind DVD-R/DVD+R)

Lennart Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml