Creating DVDs

Introduction
There are many reasons why DVD authoring is growing rapidly in popularity. Standalone "set top" DVD players are exploding in popularity, thanks to declining prices and an abundance of movies available in this high-quality format. And DVD recorders, too, are dropping in price, to the point where they are not much more than a good VCR. But, in addition to their ability to record movies from an analog or digital video source (and even, with suitable tools, to copy existing discs), DVD recorders are a great way to back up data -- up to 4.7GB per disc. Some recorders can also do double duty as a CD rewriter, allowing them to be used for the creation of audio CDs, video CDs, MP3 collections or other CD recording tasks.

In this article, we'll look at the process of creating a DVD or Video CD and the tools available for this purpose.

Hardware: There are numerous DVD burners already on the market, and prices are falling as consumer interest grows. The two main categories of DVD writers intended for consumers use are DVD-R (e.g., Apple's SuperDrive and the almost-identical Pioneer DVR-A03/A04/A05 series of drives) and DVD+RW (e.g., the HP dvd100i/dvd200i/dvd300i, etc .)

Prices on both drives and media have declined substantially in the years since the products' introductions. A Pioneer A03 DVD writer originally sold for close to $1000; it now sells for around US$275. Apple-branded media started off selling for about US$5 per disc; compatible media now sells for as little as C$3 per disc now; bulk packs are even less expensive. DVD+RW drives still command a considerable premium: the drives are about $400 and the media is around $6 - $7 per disc ($9 - 11 Cdn.) In our opinion, DVD-R is currently the best choice for general DVD authoring. The media and drives are less expensive and the discs you create will play in more players than those produced by a DVD+RW drive.

With that said, we came to appreciate the ability to rewrite a disc during our tests, and we had no problems reading the DVD+RW discs on any of the three DVD players we tested them on. (HP says nine out of ten players will work with the discs.)

Although we do not recommend DVD-RAM drives for DVD creation, such drives are now available at dramatically reduced prices -- as low as US$75 for the 5.2GB model (2.6GB per side). Note, however, that these drives are poor choice if creating a DVD disc suitable for playing on standard DVD players is your goal. The "type 2" media required for this task is hard to find, expensive and incompatible with more players than either DVD-R/RW or DVD+RW media, recorded using their respective DVD recorders. Interestingly, there are combination drives capable of writing to both DVD-R and DVD-RAM discs, at prices somewhat lower than DVD-R/RW drives cost.

You will of course need some content to burn onto the discs. For this test, we produced movie files using a JVC digital video camera, a VCR connected to the analog video capture connector on an ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500, and video content ripped from DVD disks using Dup-DVD. We saved files as AVI, ASF (WMV), QuickTime (MOV), MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 in order to test the import capabilities of the various programs.