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.
