Dell proprietary hardware/DVD burning

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Seraphim974

Gawd
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My sis has a Pentium 3 dell (dimension 4100?) with a dvd player and cd-rw drive and no more room for more 5 1/4 inch drives. She wanted to copy some dvd's and got this software online that this guy she works with that burns dvd's in his spare time told her works best. It does look like a powerful program. Problem is that she has not dvd burner *doh*. she told me to pick one up for her if it wasn't over 100 dollars. I saw a plextor and pioneer at Best buy and figure either will be decent because i recognize both names. Anyways, i am wondering how i should manage her disc drives. Which 2 of the 3 drives should i have in the comp? she wants to burn cds and dvd's and play everything also. Should i get a dvd burner that does absolutely everything (cd-r,cd-rw,dvd+r,dvd-r,dvd+rw,dvd-rw, as most do) and just have the dvd player and dvd burner in the computer by themselves? Will this be sufficient to copy dvd's one way or another? Do people usually copy the dvd to their hard drive and then to the blank DVD? any input is appreciated.

also, can store bought hardware be casually installed into a dell system? I realized that when i was getting her santa cruz sound card to work i had to go to Dell.com and use their special driver for the sound card.
 
I'd run a dvd reader and the burner in there if she's planning on doing a lot of 1 to 1 copying. Something to note, dvd media is only cheap for the 4.7gb media. If you are copying dvd's > 4.7gb, you'll have to transcode them. This involves ripping and re-encoding them, something that is EXTREMELY processor intensive. FWIW, a sample transcode of a full-length dvd takes me about 20 minutes on my system listed in sig, but I've got a mid-end/upper tier proccie. P3 of that caliber will take hours, 6-10 I'd guess. The process from start to finish for me (insert dvd to copy to final burn of my backup) is 35 minutes. 10ish mins to rip, 30ish mins to transcode and 6 mins to burn. Friend with hardware of that era (1.4 tbird) takes about 8 hours for rip/transcode/burn.

If you dont plan on doing transcoding, media for dual-layer dvd's run about $7 per disk, but then there is no transcoding involved.
 
I am sure that I don't know as much as Bullitt, But I did a lot of investigating lately
because my CD-Burner bit the dust and I decided if I wanted to copy anything
I would just go ahead and get a DVD-Burner this time.

So money versus product, I ordered the NEC-3520A @ New Egg . The price was
63.95 2nd day fed-ex free. I got the DVD-R disks from Rima.com 100 disks on a
spindle at $45 .00 + shipping charges of about $6.
The tests I saw showed the Plextor 716A to be the best. But the 716A is about twice the
price of the NEC-3520A. The disks I got from Rima are Taiyo Yuden brand which
is well thought of by the DVD Geeks.

See you later, Gib
 
Seraphim974 said:
My sis has a Pentium 3 dell (dimension 4100?) with a dvd player and cd-rw drive and no more room for more 5 1/4 inch drives. She wanted to copy some dvd's and got this software online that this guy she works with that burns dvd's in his spare time told her works best. It does look like a powerful program. Problem is that she has not dvd burner *doh*. she told me to pick one up for her if it wasn't over 100 dollars. I saw a plextor and pioneer at Best buy and figure either will be decent because i recognize both names. Anyways, i am wondering how i should manage her disc drives. Which 2 of the 3 drives should i have in the comp? she wants to burn cds and dvd's and play everything also. Should i get a dvd burner that does absolutely everything (cd-r,cd-rw,dvd+r,dvd-r,dvd+rw,dvd-rw, as most do) and just have the dvd player and dvd burner in the computer by themselves? Will this be sufficient to copy dvd's one way or another? Do people usually copy the dvd to their hard drive and then to the blank DVD? any input is appreciated.

also, can store bought hardware be casually installed into a dell system? I realized that when i was getting her santa cruz sound card to work i had to go to Dell.com and use their special driver for the sound card.
Click to expand...

I installed a DVD burner with no problem into my dell, the only hiccup that I came across was that the screwless install brackets fitted on the DVD burner made it almost too large to fit into the bay, I finaggled it in and it works great. But you should be aware that pretty much every full length/feature film length DVD is going to req. some type of compression to fit onto a single layer disk so if she's copying movies for backup purposes etc. I'd recommend using DVDXCopy if you can find it, DVD Decrypter and DVD2One if you can't. There are other programs out there that will rip and burn for you but I don't think any of them are as easy as DVDXCopy, its soooo easy to use.
good luck.
 
I personally use DVD Shrink (google it to find it), which I think works very well. You can specify your output media type (4.7GB, 8.5GB DL, etc) & it'll automatically compress everything to fit the output. You can also customize the compression & remove unwanted content, such as additional soundtracks that you may never use, such as the ones encoded in other languages.

If you do use this, I also recommend DVD Decrypter. DVD Shrink will extract the contents of a DVD & store it as an iso file that can be burned to DVD with either Nero, or DVD Decrypter (which is why I recommend it, if you don't have Nero installed). DVD Shrink also removes the the CSS encryption or Macrovision or whatever you call it.

If anyone knows of any other free utilities, I'd love to hear about them
 
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