Compaq Presario with DVD-R
September 2001DVD Home Recording Reality
by David Dritsas
It only seems natural that in the world of video, DVD recording should be the next step in home recording. But DVD recording has traveled a long and complicated road to fruition. Thankfully, the dust is settling, and recording devices are hitting the market this year. One area quick to grab onto recordable DVD is the computer market, and Compaq has a desktop PC in its Presario 7000 line with a DVD recording drive built-in.
It is important to give you a brief overview of what has been happening in the DVD recording space and why it has been so tumultuous. The primary problem has been (and is still) an abundance of formats. There are three: DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and DVD-RAM. DVD-RAM has been around for a while and has been used in the business market for storage. Recently, companies such as Panasonic and others have been trying to sell this format in the home recording market in the form of A/V components (which E-Gear has previously reviewed). Critics have not been entirely supportive, because DVD-RAM cannot be played back in the millions of DVD players already in people's homes.
DVD-RW and DVD+RW are both recordable DVD formats that claim to work on existing model DVD players, save a few first-generation players of years past. Both have write-once versions of themselves as well (DVD-R and DVD+R). Apple and Compaq were the first to offer PCs with DVD-R drives. DVD+RW is a competing format being marketed primarily by Philips, Hewlett Packard and others with products due this fall. The differences between the two formats are hard to identify and lay mostly in technical detail and fluffy marketing. What can be said is that DVD-RW and DVD+RW are not compatible with each other.
Compaq decided to use the DVD-RW format for its consumer-grade desktop line, partly because the drives were available and partly because the company felt DVD-RW ultimately would be the winning format for DVD home recording. Compaq's PC configurations with DVD-R vary. E-Gear reviewed a Presario with an AMD Athlon
1 GHz processor, 256MB of RAM and a 66.8 GB hard drive. It had all the normal PC ports for connecting peripherals including FireWire (aka IEEE 1394) for transferring digital video from a camcorder to the hard drive. There are three drives: the old floppy-disk drive, a CD-ROM drive and the Pioneer DVD-R drive, which can also write to CD-R and CD-RW media. A firmware upgrade is supposed to be available later for consumers who wish to use DVD-RW.
Primarily, this PC's mission is to allow the user to edit and copy digital home videos to DVD. Of course it is natural for people to ask if it is possible to copy DVD movies or even programs from your television. DVD movies are encoded with several copy-protection measures (called Macrovision) to prevent pirating. There are ways to get around it, but you won't find any piracy how-tos here.
Off-air or cable TV recording is a different story. The PC E-Gear reviewed was not configured with a PC/TV tuner card, but the addition of such a tuner card and software would allow you to record television to the hard drive of the PC and then burn it to DVD. Keep in mind, however, that you are recording analog material—not digital video with 5.1 surround sound tracks. Compaq will release a version with a PC tuner card built-in this fall.
For capturing and editing digital video Compaq uses a program called Studio DV, an entry-level editing program. There are three phases to the program: image capture (copying digital footage from camcorder to the PC), editing and make movie (the actual compression of the final cut). The software is mostly intuitive, and a lot of the basic film edits are performed through drag-and-drop functions. Some aspects, however, are not spelled out very well, such as sound editing. Unfortunately, a printed manual explaining all functions is not provided, and Compaq's starter manual doesn't cover nearly all the features of this program. Still, the basic tutorial will get you through some of the basics of creating an edited film.
I shot some footage of a local improv comedy group in Philadelphia and used Studio DV to make a small montage movie, splicing together different parts of a single show. I transferred the footage from the digital camcorder using the software and a 1394 cable and edited it. Now it was time to save the final cut. The software allows you to save the movie in several ways. If you want a straight movie to copy to a DVD-R disc that will play back on your DVD player, the disc must be saved as MPEG2 video. You can also save it as other formats, such as AVI, Real and MPEG1 (the format of video CDs) for other applications. There are also different resolution settings you can choose in an options menu in case you are creating smaller files that you want to put on the Web or e-mail to people.
Before burning my final movie to a disc I needed to create a menu screen for my DVD. For this, Compaq includes a program called DVDit!. This is a very basic, but cool little program that lets you create a menu screen that will work just like the menu screens on a real DVD. You can create buttons that link to different sections of the video. It comes with a number of preset graphics, both backgrounds and buttons. Some of the images are a bit generic, but you can add your own still images. Soundtracks can be added as well, but only to the actual video not the menu screen. (As with the editing program, DVDit! lacks a comprehensive printed manual, and since a lot of the features are not apparent, it makes learning them a bit frustrating.) Once complete, the Menu screen is linked to your movie, and you move onto the next step of DVDit!, actually burning the DVD.
There are three options to burning: Test, Test and Create disc and Create disc. The first one just tests to make sure that the material you created can be burned to disc. The second option tests the material and then burns it and the third just burns it without a test. For reasons I cannot explain, the Test and Create disc option failed me twice, both from different errors that halted operations. I decided to take my chances and go straight to burning without a test and, sure enough, it worked without a hitch. I checked the final disc by playing it back in the DVD-R drive itself and it worked just like a regular DVD. The true test, of course, was in a real DVD player. I tried it out on my own Zenith 2200, a capable but hardly fancy DVD player. For instance, it plays DVD and CD, but not CD-R. My newly created DVD worked perfectly and although my movie-making skills could use a little work, there were no problems with the disc or playback.
In the end I give the Compaq Presario good marks. It does what it says it's going to do and while the software could use some improvement, it gets the basics across well enough. The price for this PC is high, but considering what you are actually getting—a DVD/CD recorder and a fairly powerful computer in one package—I'd say this is a pretty good deal.
