At this moment one of the most important issues on CD-R/DVD is the struggle between the several DVD rewritable formats. DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD+R and DVD-RAM are all competing for a place on the market, but making it hard for the consumers to choose.
LiteOn has now said it has chosen to work with Ricoh's DVD+RW format and is planning to ship the first products in the first quarter of 2002.
MET Technology, Ricoh's Taiwan distributor, said the situation between DVD-RW and DVD+RW is much like the competition between VHS and Beta standards '“ no one is for certain which one will come out with the greater market share. |
DVD+RW technology allows for burning at 2.4x speed '“ DVD-RW, 1x speed. The DVD-RW standard only allows for burning of 1GB at a time. Once the data is burned onto the disc it cannot be rewritten without completely reformatting the whole disc. DVD+RW does not set limits on the amount of data that can be burned at one time, and data can be rewritten directly over the previous burn.
Ricoh is currently producing DVD+RW drives (for OEM orders) at its factory in Dongguan, Guangdong Province. The company has received orders from Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Dell. In the future it plans to offer DVD+RW kits and key components.
At the same time we can find on Yahoo a press release of the company MedioStream. Their software neoDVDstandard will be able to work with all formats:
When you just want to burn a DVD, you shouldn't have to worry about what software works with which format, whether it's DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD+R or DVD-RAM,'' said Doran. ``MedioStream has created products that let you turn home movies into CDs and DVDs regardless of what format you are using, even if you don't know what that format is. Video in, DVD out, that's what neoDVD does and it really is just that simple.'' |
In addition to supporting all DVD-recording formats, neoDVDstandard also allows users to create DVDs that can be played in either NTSC or PAL video formats. The automatic PAL/NTSC conversion further simplifies the process for consumers: Users don't even need to know what format they need -- they can simply choose which country they want the DVD to be played in, and the software takes care of the rest.
To ensure that consumers can use software on their existing PC, MedioStream is also committed to ensuring that its products are compatible with the latest operating systems including the new Windows XP, which allows home users to create, play and interact using digital media.
Source: Digitimes.com
