Will there be any more DVD standards?

[brawnypandora0]

I was quite surprised when I bought a blank DVD from a vending machine and realized that it was actually a DVD+R, which my four year old laptop could not read. So since there's Blu-ray now, is this it for all DVD formats?

I hope DVD players produced today are able to read DVD+R.

Also, my friend gave my a DVD-R with 700 MB of information on it. But when I try to add more data to the disk, nothing happens. Why? Isn't DVD-R supposed to store 4.7GB?

[cascade9]

DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-R/RW are supported by pretty much all the DVD drives now (and decent drives have supported the formats for years now).

DVD+R was out in mid/late 2002. The 'problem' is that the DVD Forum, who develpoed DVD-R format, didnt say that DVD+R was actually a DVD format untill 2008.

*edit- DVD (and CD) writeable discs cannot be written to if the disc is 'finalised'.

[chriswyatt]

I remember my brother bought a recordable DVD drive a while back, we went to PC World and he wasn't sure whether to get DVD-R or DVD+R, we ended up getting DVD-R as it seemed the more likely one to work, it didn't work. The drive only supported DVD+R, what a headache for consumers. Luckily most if not all drives support both now so you don't need to worry.

[RandomJoe]

Also, my friend gave my a DVD-R with 700 MB of information on it. But when I try to add more data to the disk, nothing happens. Why? Isn't DVD-R supposed to store 4.7GB?

DVD-Rs are typically used in a "write-once" fashion. Once the data has been written to the disc it is closed / finalized and no matter how much was put on it you can no longer add to it.

With CDs, there was support for "multisession" - I don't know if DVDs support it or not, as I never used it. You could mark the burn multisession, and the disc was left "open" / not finalized so more could be added later. But every write has to be done this way, as soon as a write closes/finalizes the disc it can never be appended to again.

[blueturtl]

No more DVD standards, the media vendors probably want to push Blu-Ray now.

Though I doubt I'd go for opticals any more. There is too much variation in the standards and the way they are implemented for me to trust my data to them any more.

Case in point: Practically all drives I have ever encountered read cd-r and cd-rw. A drive from any make will read a disc by any make burned by any drive. Few if any compatibility troubles ever. With DVDs you have your DVD- DVD+ and RAM variants, and despite the fact most drives sport all standards support I constantly run into trouble reading or writing these disks when used with different equipment.

I'd be surprised if Blu-Ray or any subsequent standards made things any better.

[akand074]

Most drives for the last at least 5 years have supported both, there's not much difference between the two. I've heard they are to replace DVD-R and DVD+R with just DVDR in the future. Blu-ray will unlikely be mainstream for a while.. not many people need more than 4.7GB for a disk, 25GB is still overkill. The only purpose I can see for Blu-ray is if you're downloading and burning HD movies which can vary between 5GB-50GB depending on the resolution/bit rate. But I doubt many people would burn 25GB of data as back up on a disk, especially since there are so many external drives available at reasonable prices.

[LowSky]

Actually business are always looking for a better way to store data backups. In fact many still use tape. Most would love a fast and economical way to back up large quantities of data. Blue-Ray has that ability but unfortunately drive speed is still very much a problem.

[cascade9]

Actually business are always looking for a better way to store data backups. In fact many still use tape. Most would love a fast and economical way to back up large quantities of data. Blue-Ray has that ability but unfortunately drive speed is still very much a problem.

Most places still use tape, for good reason. Its very, very VERY reliable.....something that optical meida is not.

Nowhere that I know of that uses tape for backups has any intention of moving to optical media.

[Lucradia]

Tape is good, etc.

Blu-Ray has run its course, and big companies are still funding research to go farther (Holographic Storage) on HVD standard (Just think: 2 TB of Data Minimum on a DVD-size disk you can buy freely at a store.)