DVD Flavors

Good-bye, stretched tapes and dropouts hello, pristine digital images, generation after generation. With the right hardware and software you can simply burn an edited project to DVD with the click of a mouse. Sound like a dream? It's not. The first affordable DVD recording devices are already in stores, in mail-order catalogs and on the Net. While first generation units were in the $5,000 range, today's recorders list for under $1,000, with street prices below $800.

Unfortunately, there is more to DVD than meets the eye. When DVD manufacturers told us that the initials "DVD" stood for "digital versatile disc," they weren't kidding. The recordable standards vying for your dollars are DVD-RAM, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R and DVD+RW. The good news is these are all very exciting technologies, some excelling at high capacity data storage and some offering convenient distribution. The bad news is they aren't all compatible with each other, and most won't play in the DVD player you have in your living room. Before you commit to a DVD format, you'd better know the difference. To help you understand these emerging formats, we've developed this handy guide to bring you up to speed on all of the issues.

DVD-Video
The standard that started it all was DVD-Video (and DVD-Audio, too), those discs you pop in your DVD Player to watch feature films and interactive productions. The standard supports a capacity extension up to 8.5GB per side, but this is not available at this time. DVD-Video is a playback-onl…