The humble CD started out in life as a joint development by Sony and Philips, solely as an audio medium. It wasn’t long though before the computer world, realising that an essentially data disk (after all, that’s what digital music is), with a 650 megabyte capacity could be useful, especially in the field of software delivery. Thus were the CD-ROM drive and disk born, and as most of us are aware, production of the latter is now so cheap that they can arrive in the every day post from firms like AOL and Tiscali, only to be binned (or used as the ubiquitous beer mat at parties!).

DVD-ROM was born from a similar sideways process. Incidentally, the V stands for VERSATILE, not Video. The movie industry had been looking for a new medium for the home/rental market to replace relatively costly but lowish-quality VHS tapes, which were prone frequently to damage and jamming when loaned out to a whole host of unknown VCR users. The movie DVD looks like a CD-ROM but looks, as we know, looks can be deceptive. For one thing it has the capacity to be four-sided. Four?! Has BNibbles gone completely ga-ga? Well, for one thing, the occasional DVD is double-sided, meaning that it needs to be turned over half way through, but mercifully I’ve only got one ‘flipper’ in my whole DVD collection. Secondly, the DVD has the capability of having two layers of data on one side, one a conventional ‘shiny’ layer, like a CD-ROM and the other, a semi-transparent one hovering halfway buried in the clear plastic that makes up the outer protection of the disk. Given that each layer can hold around 4.7 gigabytes of information (although I believe the semi-transparent layer is slightly curtailed), you can see that this is considerably more than the 700 megabytes now standard on CD-R’s. Even a single-layered DVD is nearly seven times larger. Using a DVD-ROM is now not uncommon in the world of PCs. Not only are DVD-ROM readers cheap – I’ve just bought (a good) one for £32, but the disks lend themselves even better to the delivery of large suites of software, encyclopaedia like MS Encarta for instance. They are also ‘backwards-compatible’ with CD-ROMs so they are even more useful, and anyone building or specifying a new PC these days is very unlikely to chose a CD-ROM reader alone.

I’ve just bought a NEC ND-1300a DVD Re-Writer to put in my latest reincarnation of my PC. Not only can it read all the existing formats of DVD, but unlike the vast majority of its peers, it can actually write to TWO of them, not the more normal one. There is one other maker producing a similar machine at time of writing, Sony, but this is in such heavy demand that it is on very long delivery and/or higher priced.

I haven’t yet dived into the home DVD-recorder market, but my meagre research does show that Philips seem to have nailed their colours to the DVD+R(W) mast, whereas Panasonic have plumped for DVD-RAM (curiously) and DVD-R. Those who remember Philips’ TWO abortive launches into the video market, with their own initial very bulky video cassette, followed by their double-sided V2000* tape, before giving in and adopting VHS might want to take note. I wonder if that’s the reason these machines are currently the cheapest on the market.

FITTING IT

When it comes to connecting it, I’ve taken the view that it probably needs to be either on its own dedicated IDE cable, or at the very least, the Master drive on that cable. Since I made my hard drives that bit more secure from data corruption by connecting them to a separate RAID card, I can now spare a whole IDE channel for this particular project, so a ribbon to itself, it gets.

Appearance-wise, the machine looks like any other CD/DVD recorder, although it does only have one LED to show disk activity, whereas I’ve been used to a separate one to show that recording is taking place. It’s also a pity that they couldn’t pick the same ivory colour as all the other items protruding from the front panel of my PC, this being slightly greyer.

Being the retail version, rather what is called the ‘OEM’ version, (which effectively means that apart from connectors and four screws, you’re on your own), you also get quite a wide-ranging suite of software, from the latest version of Nero Burning ROM **, to InCD and CinePlayer. InCD is a utility that allows you to treat a blank DVD as a damned great floppy disk so that files can be dragged and dropped to it. Anyone with Windows XP will find this superfluous as Windows Explorer beat them to it.

IN USE – A CLOUD ON THE HORIZON

To kick off with, I used the two disks supplied to confirm that the machine works OK. Being Verbatim brand, and supplied by NEC, it was only to be expected that they’d work and they did. It was shortly after this that I began to wonder whether I shouldn’t have waited for the Sony model, however long its delivery was.

One little trick I learned very early was to buy a small sample pack of DVD-R media from www.cdr-media.co.uk. This included some ‘budget’ brands, some ‘mainstream’ brands and even some generic unbranded disks. I was slightly heartened by this and by a list I downloaded from a German enthusiast who had apparently made it his life’s work (get a life, Rudi) to assess the tolerance of this machine to cheapo disks!
Generally speaking, when something like this happens with a new model, we all sit back and wait for the manufacturer to re-issue the firmware version for the machine.

I don’t suppose NEC would be very receptive to warranty claims if the machine turned up with someone else’s firmware on board!