Expensive lesson learned?

[captain_slinky]

Hey, you! Yes, you... my techno-savy "peeps"! I have 100 blank DVD-R Recordable disks sitting here, and they seem to be incapable of having anything but straight data. If I try to copy a DVD, it says "Uhnt-uhh, you can't do that!"

Same DVD copies just fne to a DVD+R, though (note the subtle difference between the "+" and the "-" there).

When I *ought* all these blanks, the people at CompUSA couldn't tell me the difference between DVD+R and DVD-R... one ever-so-helpful-and-intelligent sales associate said "I think it's just that the DVD-R are, like, older and stuff? But they work just the same".

And yes, I'm an idiot for going to CompUSA for technical advice.

So did I just teach myself a valuable lesson? Did I finally learn that the difference between - and + is that one can't be used to make copies? Or am I just doing something wrong?

Comments

[spazzychic.livejournal.com]

Making illegal copies of DVDs are we? Karma! :D

[captain-slinky.livejournal.com]

What? Oh, no... you have me all wrong! I'm just making back-up copies of movies that I already own!

For now...

[(Anonymous)]

What model of optical drive (DVD-writer) do you have? Some of them can do DVD-R and DVD-RW, some can do DVD+R and DVD+RW. Some can do both...

Also, it may have successfully copied the movie but your playback device (if a different DVD player, ie, not your computer) may not support that particular writable format.

The DVD "standard" is sadly not very standard.

Rather than go into the difference...

[collisions.livejournal.com]

I will instead send you here, which does a better job than I would of explaining.

My guess is (and I know this doesn't help much) either your drive firmware needs updating, the software doing the writing needs updating, or it won't work due to the drive and/or DVD and/or software.

Re: Rather than go into the difference...

[captain-slinky.livejournal.com]

Thank you!