By WILSON ROTHMAN
Almost all DVD movies ship on 9 GB dual-layer discs, single discs with twice the storage to hold the film, its 5.1 surround-sound audio track and all of that bonus material. The problem: most DVD burners on the market only write to single-sided discs, which hold just 4.7 GB, making it virtually impossible to make a home copy of a full-length film with decent picture quality. This month, Sony has launched the first two-layer DVD burner. It solves certain problems — and introduces new ones.
The burner itself is a good one, capable of burning write-only single-layer discs in under 10 minutes using any software you like. It can handle every type of writeable DVD except DVD-RAM, and if that doesn't mean anything to you you're safer with a multi-format burner like this anyhow.
Burning a double-layer disc — known as DVD+R DL — is the same as burning a single layer although for the time being, you have to use the included Nero software to do it. Since Nero has a straightforward task picker and DVD building utility, you may end up using it for all of your burning matters. When you queue up more than 4.7 GB of data for your DVD, Nero tells you that you can still use a DVD9 disc — that is, a disc with two layers. You actually get about 8.5 GB of space, but it's plenty. Once all of the files are made ready for writing, the process takes about 45 minutes.
Actually, it will take about 45 minutes no matter what you're doing. That's because, in order for the format to be readable by standard DVD players, the software must write data to every inch of the disc. When it's done writing your data, it fills in the rest with junk, but that junk doesn't take any less time to write. Because of this, Sony recommends that you avoid burning a double-layer disc unless you have more than 4.7 GB of data.
Although this process makes the double-layer discs more compatible, they still can't be played on every player. They probably won't work on any DVD recorders, set-top or computer-based, on the market, although presumably some of the burners that come out this year, starting now, will recognize the discs. Sony says that most regular DVD players do handle the format and our testing doesn't contradict that. However, a company spokesman mentioned that, for reasons unknown, combo players with built-in VHS decks have a tendency to reject the discs. If you generally watch movies on combo players, computers or set-top DVD recorders, you'll probably have trouble with the double-layer format.
One caveat if you are game to take the $199 plunge: the discs cost around $12 a piece at this point, nearly 10 times the price of a standard single-layer write-once disc. That's one of the funny quirks of the industry: writing a feature film on a blank disc could cost you more than just going out and buying the movie. |
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