There’s a lot of change in DVD burners technology. A standalone DVD burner is now affordable enough that CD-only burners are an endangered species. At the high end, new DVD technology has brought consumers new types of DVD burners with massive amounts of storage space for high-definition video

What Is a DVD Burner?

A DVD burner is an optical drive that uses a laser to read and record CDs and DVDs (digital versatile discs). DVD burners are superior to CD burners because of the amount of information a DVD can hold. While a CD is limited to around 80MB of data, a standard DVD can hold 4GB and a dual-layer DVD stores up to 8.5GB. This extra space makes a DVD burner an essential tool for creating permanent backups of files and programs.

Beyond backups, the fun of a DVD burner is the ability to create DVDs that you can watch on TV or share with friends. A DVD burner will also write CDs, allowing you to create custom mixes from a digital music collection.

Write Speed

Nobody wants to wait all day for a DVD, so write speeds, or the time it takes for DVD burner to create a DVD, are increasing. A 16x or 20x write speed should be a minimum, and a DVD burner will support incredibly fast write speeds for CDs, up to 64x.

The speed of a DVD burner is limited by the connection method. Internal DVD burners that connect to your desktop PC via parallel or serial ATI ports are much faster than external USB DVD burners, since USB is limited in the amount of data it can carry.

When choosing a DVD burner, pay careful attention to the system requirements to make sure it will work with your PC. External USB DVD burners typically have lower requirements than internal DVD burners. Unsure about which connection type you have? Most PCs have both, but check first.

DVD Burner Formats

There are three main formats for discs created by DVD burners. DVD-R discs can be written once and will play in almost any brand of DVD player. DVD-RW discs can be erased and rewritten, or “read/write”. These discs require a compatible DVD player or DVD burner to play.

A newer option is DVD-RAM. These DVD burners can rewrite sections of a DVD, essentially using the DVD burner as an additional hard drive. These DVDs are useful for file backup and temporary storage, but they won’t play on most DVD players.

Making Movies

DVD burners are not movie-production suites. They give you the ability to create DVDs, but you’ll need software to edit your movies and create menus and chapters. Some DVD burners may include demo versions of movie-editing and disc authoring software, but these have fewer features than the full versions.

A number of DVD burners include the LightScribe feature, which allows you to burn a label directly onto a compatible DVD. These DVD burners make it easy to label and organize your DVDs. LightScribe is a very cool feature, but it limits you to black-and-white images. Printable DVDs and a specialized inkjet printer give you the ability to create discs with full-color artwork.

You cannot copy commercial movies with a DVD burner without first breaking the CSS encryption on a protected disc. Although fair use allows a customer to create a single backup copy of purchased movies, music and software, the courts have held that bypassing CSS—even for a single backup—is breaking the law.

You can use a DVD burner to create DVDs of your home movies and copyright-free movies that you buy or download. These will play on your DVD player and free up space on your hard drive. If you’re planning to do a lot of work with video, be aware that you’ll need a powerful processor, extra RAM, and lots of hard drive space. Uncompressed video files are huge and slow the performance of all but the most powerful desktop PCs.

Data Storage

One of the best uses of a DVD burner is to create backups of your operating system, software and essential files. If you use your desktop PC for work, or if you have an extensive collection of music, video or other files, you should be creating archival backups periodically to protect against viruses or a catastrophic system failure.

A dual-layer DVD burner will take those gigabytes of precious data and save them on a stack of DVDs that takes up little space. Software is available to help your DVD burner organize and manage this task.

If you’re a multimedia author, graphic designer, or 3-D modeler, a DVD burner is an easy way to make finished projects portable. A DVD burner can also be used to create an electronic media kit or business presentation for clients

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High-Definition DVD Burners

Blu-ray has emerged as the dominant high-definition DVD format for home entertainment, and you can get a DVD burner that will create Blu-ray discs. These DVD burners are very expensive, and the technology is still a moving target, because the Blu-ray standards haven’t yet been finalized

Most consumers would do well to wait before buying a Blu-ray DVD burner. If you’re creating high-definition video professionally, choose a Blu-ray DVD burner over an HD-DVD burner for its compatibility. If you have a very large hard drive that needs to be backed up on a regular basis, you might find the extra data storage of a Blu-ray or HD-DVD burner worth the extra expense