DVD Success!

[Vidgal]

Just thought I'd post a success story to offset some of the problems posts and maybe help someone determine a good solution for their own needs. This weekend I made my first real DVD. I've been making VCD's and SVCD's for a year or more, but outside of my sister with her Apex, nobody could play them except on a computer. Anyway, a week or so ago I managed to snag a mis-posted LaCie DVD-RAM/R drive on Ebay. Unfortunately, I could not get the firewire case to work with a PC. LaCie tech support was not supportive. It seems they are still very MAC centric, which probably explains why I could not get the case to work. However, (and fortunately I knew this) inside the non-PC compliant LaCie case was a perfectly good Panasonic LF-D311 internal EIDE drive I installed it, and works great. Burned my first DVD with Movie Factory and a second with PowerDirector Pro trial version. Yes, I sort of wish I had DVD-RW, but then I'd have paid a lot more than $225 for that. I am finding the DVD-RAM function very useful as it works like a hard drive. I can copy and move things around until I'm ready to burn a final copy on DVD-R. My first two DVD's play great on my new JVC, my old Panasonic and a neighbor's Sony. They were burned on fairly cheap ($3.99) CompUSA DVD media. I bought these not only because they were inexpensive, but because the plain silver media always worked best for me in CD's. This Panasonic drive meets my needs right now. I've seen several good prices on Ebay for these drives new, so it's something to consider. One thing the drive doesn't have is stunning software. Is it just me or do the OEM versions of MyDVD and DVDit really suck?

My current system setup is:

P4 1.8
512 RAM
MSI Ultra MB (w/Promise RAID controller)
Win XP
Seagate 60 gig boot drive
Western Digital 100 gig video drive (no RAID yet until I get second drive)
Santa Cruz soundcard
Pyro DV card
Generic PCI modem card
Liteon 24X CDRW
Linksys 10/100 card (network to Win 98SE machine not yet setup)

[wkulecz]

Nope, The bundled MyDVD and DVDit are really retched!

They are so bad I can't believe anyone would spend extra for an upgrade!

--wally.