DVD Burners who?, what? how?

Basically I am in the market for a DVD burner. I realize how expensive they are now. I also understand the fact that there are 3 separate formats for DVD. I have been checking prices all over the net, but have not been able to find a reasonable one. Does anyone have a DVD burner out there? If so, how much did it cost? How well does it work? How much are the blank DVD discs? Basically, tell me everything.

I want to use my DVD burner to do the following:
Copy DVD movies
COPY Playstation 2 Games

Thats about it. Thanks for any help you can give..

Devin

Do NOT buy a DVD burner right now. Last time I saw, a true DVD burner (not a DVD-RAM) is well over $2000 and availible only in Japan. On top of that, DVD-R discs are about $30 a pop. DVD burning is not practical right now. The thing is, after the huge popularity of CD burners, companies are scrambling to put together a good DVD burner for home use. I think you will start to see the first generation of semi afforable ($500 or less range) DVD burners in about two years.
If you want to copy DVD movies, look in to divx(mpeg4) ripping. tomshardware.com has a quick overview about it on their site. A couple of programs and a DVD-ROM, and you can burn DVDs to CDs with decent quality. Can only watch em on a PC though.

Yea, dont buy one now. The only truly available one is by panasonic and it is several Gs. I cant wait untill they are 500- and discs are 5. Thatll be the day.

I saw one for $1500 , I would consider it , but media is too expensive . In due time, media will be cheap as regular CDs

Um, correct me if I am wrong but I found a dvd ram drive for 229. http://www.internetcommerce.com/isapi/EVisions.isa?SF_ProdDescription('dvd1101')&EvApp=s f.3014
Also, go here http://www.toshiba.com/taecdpd/techd...1101spec.shtml for the specs on that drive. I am not sure exactly which dvd ram disk it can write to, but on pricewatch they go for 15 dollars for a 5.2 gig dvd.
-Shaxs

Opp,s just noticed there is a big diff between dvd-ram and dvd-r. Dvd-ram still doesnt look bad.
-Shaxs

I checked out tomshardware.com regarding the MPEG4 DVD ripping. Sounds promising, but probably a little ways off for most of us on a small budget since it needs a LOT of horsepower to run smoothly.

Quote:

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Playback of MPEG-4 encoded video movies requires very sophisticated hardware. In our test we used a system containing an AMD Thunderbird with 800 MHz and 128 MB of memory. After all, at full screen playback (1024 x 768 x 16) of the video encoded with 720 x 576, the CPU load under Windows 2000 was almost at 80 percent. However, friends of socket7 platforms are going to be disappointed: When we tested it with an AMD K6-2/450 the playback was not smooth.

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'96 LT1 Caprice
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