On Sunday 16 November 2003 03:55 pm, Anne Wilson wrote: > On Sunday 16 Nov 2003 8:13 pm, Bryan Phinney wrote: > > > Is it on the TWiki Bryan? If not, can you put it there. > > > > If someone had asked for some specific info, I probably would have. > > This is just general info about a particular writeable media > > format. > > I foresee this being something that is asked more frequently in the > coming months, which is why I thought it a good idea to put it up. > Any pointers make a good starting place, and as dvd-writers are > becoming so much cheaper, more people will be wanting to buy them. > Certainly I will want to read all I can before I buy.
Well, I sort of foresee this as being much less of a problem in the coming months, or moreso depending on how you look at it. The newest DVD burner drives that are out support almost all formats of media, including DVD+R/+RW/-R/-RW which covers the spectrum. The biggest issue will be in explaining that depending on what media you want to burn, you need a different toolset, including different tools for the exact same hardware device but dependent on what media is in the burner. Unfortunately, I am not the best person to do a detailed CLI howto for dvd burning, I can do it but it is still a lot of trial and error to get it right for me and I prefer the GUI front-ends. There are a couple of new GUI's that take the guesswork out of it and support both different tools and formats and can even autodetect the media in the drive and use the right tool for that media. So, either newbies will go for the GUI (as I would expect) and it will become fairly seamless for them, or they will stick with the CLI, in which case, making the right choices and explaining why becomes a major headache. I will quickly plug one of the GUI's again, it is NOT free but is very reasonable and has a lot of nice features. WebCDWriter is a web based GUI for CD and DVD burning that now features full support for just about every kind of media and format that you would want to burn. You simply configure it for the device that you have and what it supports, Tell it what kind of disk you want to burn and it opens the drive and prompts you to insert the media and off you go. If you want the CD burning version, it is free and the DVD version costs about 25 euros, last I checked. http://joerghaeger.de/webCDwriter/ -- Bryan Phinney Software Test Engineer
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