Re: Routine Running

[Fraser Farrell <fraser@trilobytes.com.au>]

Doug Welch wrote:
> I have two LG 4040B's which do all the DVD formats including DVD-RAM.
> They work like a charm!


Tom,

Australian PC User magazine ranked the LG GSA-4040B as a "top buy" in their 
DVD burner review this month. Among the 12 other burners they tested, the 
NuTech DDW-061 and the LG GSA-4081B also scored "top buys". The LGs were 
especially praised for their ability to do all of the DVD formats, and they 
rated well on the speed tests too.

The 4040B has recently been replaced by the 4081B, which has the same 
capabilities but is nominally twice as fast. You could probably buy a 4081B 
at -your- local computer shop for $US 150-200 ?  

As Doug & Robert have noted, Linux has excellent support for DVD recording 
nowadays. But if you're going to use k3b make sure your screen resolution is 
at least 1024x768, or some of its action buttons will be off-screen!

The European Southern Observatory uses a Linux box to write ~80GB of fresh VLT 
data per night to DVD. See http://archive.eso.org/articles/dvd-readers.html 
for an overview.

If you are having trouble with DVD -playback- in Linux, especially of 
commercially produced discs, you should:

 - Download and install "libdvdcss". This package contains the decoders for 
most forms of copy-protected DVD content. The mainstream Linuxes can't 
include libdvdcss because of the (US) Digital Millenium Copyright Act and 
related legal stupidities.

 - If you're using Mandrake Linux, also check out http://plf.zarb.org for 
libdvdcss and heaps of other goodies.



cheers,

-- 

Fraser Farrell

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