Too Many Standards

I've been itching to buy a DVD recorder for two years now, but I haven't. Like any good consumer I decided to investigate what the manufacturers have to offer before committing to a purchase.

Well, I didn't even get that far.

Even before I could consider a manufacturer or model of DVD recorder, I had to decide of format. It turns out that there are a bewildering assortments of DVD recording formats: DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-Video, and DVD-ROM. Some formats will play on some DVD players - some won't. So formats are good at some things while other formats are faster to burn.

Lost in this technological alphabet soup I turned to a number of DVD enthusiast web sites only to discover that the case seems to be that anyone with the brain power to understand the issue comprehensively is also incapable to explaining it in simple terms.

So I gave up. I figured that one standard would emerge as the leader and then I could buy a burner. Well, I've been waiting two years.

I just happened to see a press release from the Recordable DVD Council today. It is an industry backed DVD awareness group with the mission to educate the public on DVD recording formats and options. Well, it's about damned time, I say.

Look, my needs are simple: I want to burn DVD's with my own movies and use it as a backup mechanism. The movies I burn have to play on my DVD player, on my computer, and my father's DVD player. I don't think that is asking too much.

It's time the industry wakes up to the fact that there are people like me hanging on to a few hundred dollars waiting for them to get their act together.