New DVD option: Walgreens Drugstore :)

[Dr Mordrid]

If you can believe it, some Walgreens Drugs (a chain in the US) is offering to transferr up to 2 hours of video to DVD for the huge sum of;

$35 USD, when it's not on sale. $30 when it is.

The source can be in the following formats;

VHS, VHS-C, S-VHS, 8mm, miniDV, and DVcam

Sheesh.....if that spreads chain-wide DVD recorders will probably have to drop in price.

Dr. Mordrid

[paulw]

This kind of reminds me of the mid 90s when Kodak started to putting photos on CDs before CDR and RW became common. You could also by a player as well. I guess that we will see DVD writer becomming the norm on new PCs by next year.

[wkulecz]

Unless they are using Authoring burners as opposed to the DVD-R General, I don't expect this service to last long once they start getting returns because the disks don't play right based on my experience with Pioneer A03 and every DVD player I could get my hands on. Some work fine, many don't.

Ignoring this, quality of the conversions is the main issue. There was no shortage of places to transfer your 8mm or super8 film to VHS back when VHS was "new" but few could do a good job of it.

--wally.

[Dr Mordrid]

True enough, but the impact I'm hoping for is one more downward pressure on burner prices

Dr. Mordrid

[wkulecz]

Don't matter much how cheap the burners get if you can't count on disks playing back on the random players people will buy.

If you and your audience are willing to buy new players to watch your DVD-Rs why quibble about the price of the burner. Pioneer DV-343 and a few others played my disks fine, but the market is flooded right now with players that don't play DVD-R correctly.

Problem could be authoring or a problem with the actual burning of the disk. I've no way to really tell.

I'd be thrilled to have a burner for $600 whos disks played in 75% of the players on sale at Circut City, Best Buy, Fry's etc, but I found the converse. I'd love to hear that new firmware and/or bundled software fixes the problem. But the amount of time and money I can waste finding out does have limits.

People have claimed that Sonic ReelDVD for $1000 is a "fix" but given the pure crap that the bundled Sonic MyDVD and DVDit! was, I'd not buy an ass-gasket from Sonic without a written 30-day, no questions asked, 100% refund policy.

--wally.

[Dr Mordrid]

Hopefully DVD-Multi will help resolve this situation;

http://www.dvdforum.org/forum.shtml

Dr. Mordrid

[BrianP]

Originally posted by wkulecz
People have claimed that Sonic ReelDVD for $1000 is a "fix" but given the pure crap that the bundled Sonic MyDVD and DVDit! was, I'd not buy an ass-gasket from Sonic without a written 30-day, no questions asked, 100% refund policy.

I believe that ReelDVD is based on the Scenarist engine, that was originally done by Daikan and supposedly is what the pros use. No relation to MyDVD/DVDit other than the Sonic name.

Originally posted by Dr Mordrid
Hopefully DVD-Multi will help resolve this situation.

Yes, if it will get a disc to play on a range of players; no, if authoring is indeed the problem and "playing" means only that it won't spit out the disc.

[Frank Marshall]

what about Macs?

Hey Wally,

Did you mention in a previous post that the *SuperDrive*-equipped G4 Macs can make highly compatible DVDs? If so, is that just with the standard issue software or does one need to spend up big at Heuris (spelling?) to get good DVDs?

Thanks,

Frank.

[wkulecz]

I've no experience with the Mac "super drive". People on rec.video.desktop seem to claim good compatability with their DVD-R. Perhaps they have no problems or didn't test enough players or can't say anything bad about their Macs. I take all Mac claims with a large grain of salt -- I work in a lab that is mostly Macs. No shortage of crashes or lockups compared to windows in my experience. Mac users tend to "it crashes when I do this, so I won't do that" and pretend all is well. I had no touble geting the bomb box to come up with Final Cut Pro version 1 when I tried it.

New "multi-read" specs are great for the future, but my point is there appears to be too many existing players that don't handle burned disks out in peoples homes right now to insure lots of headaches unless the fix is in the burners firmware and/or authoring software.

--wally.

[Aryko]

Personally I'm staying away from this whole writable DVD thing until a victorious standard emerges from DVD-RW, DVD-RAM and DVD+.

If history is any teacher, it will be the crappiest format among them, as all the money will be spent on promoting that standard instead of innovating it.

- A

[Indiana]

Originally posted by wkulecz
I take all Mac claims with a large grain of salt -- I work in a lab that is mostly Macs. No shortage of crashes or lockups compared to windows in my experience. Mac users tend to "it crashes when I do this, so I won't do that" and pretend all is well.

This is very true. The "stabilility-nimbus" of the MACs comes from the old 680x0 based MACs, those were in fact hard to crash when you had everything installed correctly. But ever since the transition to the PowerPC CPU the MAC is not really more stable than Windows anymore.

[Cut ter]

DVD @ Local Market In PA !

FYI

I live in Pennsylvania and Yes......
and yes at Genuardi's Family Market curently owened by (Safeway) is offering DVD Production for about 60 dollars or so up to 2 hours if I'm not mistaken.