Peter's Blog

Wife wanted me to copy some DVD's, finally giving me an excuse to buy a DVD writer. After some contemplation in PC World decided on an OEM LG GSA-4167B 16x 'Super Multi Format' which was £35 with no software, manual or even screws, which didn't bother me as I have a copy of Nero 7 Premium. It is internal, to go in my desktop PC. I toyed with getting an external USB one at £60 to use with my laptop but decided I wouldn't burn DVD's that often and to save myself £25. I can always create images on the external hard disk and write them using the desktop.

This review calls the drive a 'safe buy', one of the worlds fastest writers but a little slow reading. Don't care so much about speed if it burns reliably (unless I wanted the worlds fasted coaster maker).

I put the drive in the desktop pc but kept the old DVD-ROM installed so it now has two drives. Nero gives a nice DVD copy option that simply copies from one drive to the other. There is a verify check box to turn on, insert two disks and press go. It takes about half an hour to burn and verify the disk but it is so nice not having to swap disks half way. The disks I am copying have no copy protection so no problems there.

I grabbed a spindle of 25 Philips DVD-R's, avoiding no-name brands for something hopefully more reliable. It was only when I got home I realised that they were 8x Single layer and can only hold a paltry 4.7G or a two hour film. Never mind, the disks I am copying are single layer. If I want to blow my four hour epic masterpiece baby videos to dvd I'll have to buy more disks.

Now I am running through the possible uses I might get around to one day:

• blow home videos to DVD rather than VideoCD.
• finally blow wedding video to DVD.
• Rip all my CD's using my neat two-disk setup and copy mpeg library to DVD for backup. Can any ripping software handle two drives intelligently?
• Backup 3000 photo's to half a DVD
• Download knoppix DVD version and give it a spin.
• blow TV shows recorded from hauppauge nova-t usb to DVD: actually I probably won't bother, I'd just wait for the repeats.
• Figure out what dvd+/-W+R//-RAM means and whether it matters.

I tried editing videos from the k750i mobile on my pc. I copied the files from \MSSEMC\Media Files\video\camera on the camera's virtual drive to the pc using USB. The files all have a .3gp file extension. I tried opening them in pinnacle studio but it did not recognise the file format, even when opening them as *.*. I tried nero vision and that did not list .3gp as a supported file format but did open it as *.*.

However, even when recorded in 'high quality' the videos were pretty poor quality, not worth putting on a DVD unless the content is really worth it.

Now, when does my phone contract expire...?

I tried Nero Vision, the movie editing package in Nero Premium 7. Compared to Pinnacle Studio 8 SE it is not as good:

• I tried loading the .avi movie files from my canon powershot S1 camera and it decided that they were audio only. Studio opened them just fine.
• In Studio the play/preview shows you exactly what you will get: titles, transitions, all rendered smoothly. In Nero Vision the play facility does not show the transitions and the playback is slow and jerky. Maybe I am doing it wrong as I cannot imagine that I am supposed to blow a DVD before I can see what it will be like??? If I am doing something wrong then I will complain that it is less intuitive because there is only one play option in Studio and it Just Works.
• Nero Vision felt more like a token bundled video editing tool.

Nero Vision has more transitions and title effects with it than studio: most of the transitions in Studio have PRO written across the rendered image to encourage you to upgrade. However, most of these advanced transitions are in such poor taste that I would only use them as a joke.

Have to say it is cool that I can use the video clips from the still camera at all: they show various moments in my daughters development (sitting in baby chair, crawling, bouncing on baby bouncer, walking) that I can splice in with the video footage to give a nice overview of her first year (which went by very quickly).

ToDo: see if the clips from the K750i phone can be used or whether they are just too poor to show on a 37" tv.

I spent more time with Pinnacle studio: I went through the tour which in a few minutes told me about all I needed to know:

• how to edit a video
• how to add transitions (very easy)
• how to add titles (! didn't realise it could do that)
• how to put in sound effects.

I went through my video, cutting out the lens caps and putting in fading transitions between cuts which looks much better than a sudden stop and start. I added some titles and put 'Fin' at the end. There was no need for backing music as most of the video has music in the background. The transitions handle audio as well as video and this worked nicely. I didn't have time to watch it before I blew it and there is too much footage of the floor, walls, windows etc for my liking.

I edited it on the d410 laptop with external hard drive and rendered and blew it on my desktop pc. Rendering started about 12pm and was nearly finished when I went to bed at 11pm. By morning the CD had been ejected and it worked fine in the DVD player in the lounge. The video was about an hour long, 7 minutes short of filling the Video CD.

I downloaded a trial version of Nero 7 Premium and used it to record a snapshot of the video CD for duplication (don't want to wait 12 hours every time) and created a copy from the snapshot which works nicely. Nero 7 Premium has an awful lot of features, you can even edit videos with that. Maybe it would render them a bit faster? Maybe I can do a directors cut that leaves the floor on the cutting room floor.?

Trying to burn CD from iTunes and getting pretty useless and uninformative message 'None of the items in this playlist can be burned to disc'. Why? Setup problem? DRM? Is this a typical example of mac error messages?

Googling amongst clueless macites, it's not because I am trying to write the wrong kind of CD, data rather than audio, so I assume it may be a problem with my CD Burner. When I try to copy disks in Nero I tend to get bluescreens.

So I tried using my laptop and burning from there, running iTunes on that and accessing the shared library on the desktop pc. This setup does not appear to allow you to copy the tunes from one pc to another or burn a disc directly from a selection. I could copy the raw files but I have to fiddle about.

I would go to another package for organising music only I have some purchased music in iTunes. Maybe the solution is to use two packages, iTunes for purchased music (I cannot bring myself to buy a whole CD just for one or two good tracks) and another to organise my cd collection, a package that is not so obsessed with DRM and stopping you from doing things, or if it does stop you it gives an explicit reason why.

It would be good to set up a Multimedia Server to play music in the lounge but it would involve:

• buying Video card with TV out, wireless network card, wireless keyboard and mouse
• continuing with my efforts to make pc silent (silent psu)
• training the wife to use it

It could also download podcasts and remote backup my server. Hum, have to think more, I can always have it turn itself on and off to a schedule.

For my work PC I have been bought an AOpen 16x DVD R/W that can write dual layer DVD's, that's 8.5G! It cost about £43. I have heard that AOpen were good but this looks like real quality, it even came with:

• Nero 6 including all the software you can think of even vaguely related to CDs and DVDs.
• Some DVD studio thing that won't be very useful at work.
• mounting screws- first drive I've ever seen that same with these.
• three front bezels in different colours
• a thing to stick in the hole to release a disc when the power is off. No more bending paper clips!

Seems to work so far with Win2k on an 8 year old Pentium 2 333M.

Best of all, it can actually read CD-R's I blow at home! Now I'm all set to use Linux Live rescue CD's.

Installed an old Yamaha CRW2216E in my Windows 2000 pc at work as I needed to blow a CD. Unfortunately, the CD writer came with Nero version 3 which will not install because Windows 2000 did not exist when it was released.

I had a look for a freeware CD writer and came across CDBurnerXP. Here is a potted review:

• Despite the name it supports Windows 2000, 98 etc
• I installed it and it Just Worked. I did not need to install any special CD drivers.
• It is a very professional looking program.
• It appears to have features for examining .ISOs
• It can burn audio CD's, although I don't have much use for that at work.

Recommended for those with ancient or modern CD/RW's. For the record, the Yamaha cost £200, I see CD/RW's are now less than £20.