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[MGD_King]

With all the features for DVD burners (for PC) out today, what do you all suggest? I may be picking one up for Christmas and wanted to get a heads up now.

Thanks for your input!

[bebop]

Are you talking hardware or software?  I use two different porgrams depending on what I am doing...Cyberlink's Power Producer for making DVD digital photo albums (basically, slideshows with music, transitions etc.  with customizable menus).  For backing up I use Nero6.  Both are easy to use and not too expensive (you get a free trial with PP and with Nero6).   There is alot of hardware out there, but I have an ATAPI Dual 8x4x12 which meets my needs, for now (I get distracted easily by shiny new speedier drives   ).  

[steje]

I did a bit of research before I bought my DVD-burner. I went with the ND-3500AG from NEC. On all the forums I read through it seemed as though it was a toss up between NEC, LG, Pioneer and Plextor. I'm a Huuuge fan of Lite-On value... but apparently, while they make really good CD-burners, their DVD-burners are crap... go figure. Most of the reading I did suggested that between the brands I mentioned (Ben-Q also seemed well regarded) the choice came down to what features are important to you... Some brands offer a slightly better software bundle along with the drive, while others offer greater compatability for the media you might want to buy, or better compatability of burned DVD video discs in various set-top DVD players.

For a while, it seemed like the different DVD formats (+/- R/RW) were destined to make life difficult. But eventually, the 'big' DVD burner vendors offered drives that support all the different +/- format variations, though sometimes with some speed discrepencies depdning on the favored format (again + or -).

Nowadays, it seems like the big question is whether or not you want Dual-Layer disc burning capability. If you're not familiar with it, up until now the 'standard' recordable DVD discs for the PC have been 'single-layer' discs that store 4.x GB (also termed DVD-5). Many DVD movies are pressed on 'dual-layer' discs that hold 8.x GB (also termed DVD-9), and burners have just started becoming widely available that support such DVD discs. The media however is still fairly pricey and the speed at which you can burn a DL piece of media is still MUCH slower than how long it takes to burn 2 single-layer DVD's.

I'm happy with my NEC, and burn over 4 GB to my TDK 8x DVD+R discs in just over 6 minutes. Even coming fresh off of my recent purchase of my 52x Lite-On CD burner where I was ecstatic with less than 4 minute burns of 700MB CD's, I was still pretty impressed with the 8x DVD-burning speed considering the tremendous capacity boost over CDR/CDRW.