Re: DVD?

[<paulwade@greenbush.com>]

Some comments:

1) The cost of offering DVD products is in addition to existing costs for
CD production. It will be a while before CD drives are considered archaic
and not worth supporting.

2) The vendor has to commit to minimum replication quantities for both CD
and DVD products. Can he sell enough of each product before it goes out of
date?

3) I have watched hardware and media prices come down. It would be
possible to offer a product on DVD-R or DVD-RW. Using affordable hardware
and media, how long does it take to record and verify an image?
Considering the density, I would definitely want to do 100% verification
even on mass-replicated discs.

4) I do believe the bootable CD spec itself allows for multiple
architectures but part of this depends on proper bios implementation. I
haven't looked at the "El Torito" bootable CD spec for well over a year
but I think it allows for other features such as offering a list of boot
images. I would like to see mkhybrid support this on a CD because we could
put the tecra install on the first CD.

5) I noticed that some bootable CD's from a certain commercial monopoly
will go ahead and boot from hard disk after a timeout. This is a good
feature because if you leave a bootable CD in the drive the system will
boot normally (except for the added timeout) when you issue a remote
reboot command. Also there are some machines I have run into that always
default to a bootable CD if one is found unless a floppy is present. There
is no bios setup option to control this "feature".

6) If the production time/cost was reasonable, I would like to offer
product on rewritable media. That way the user could recycle the previous
media upon receipt of an update. I have had good results testing CD-RW at
4x using HP media and an HP drive that is actually spec'ed at 2x RW. I am
going to try this with some cheap spindled RW media. If it works well I
might offer a product for about $1 more per CD on reusable media. I am not
sure how to mark the discs since I would want to leave space for them to
be relabeled by the user. Adhesive labels cannot be removed and it is
probably unwise to apply a second label over the first. I was thinking of
simply confining the print to a small area of a paper label and printing
some ruler lines so the user could strike out the original and remark the
disc. Any suggestions?

I will be buying a DVD-R drive to play with this. I imagine this will
involve running custom/patched kernels and dedicating a machine to nothing
but DVD experimentation. One of the problems with CD-R and CD-RW is
there are some older CD-ROM drives that don't read them well. I would
hope that this problem wasn't repeated with DVD since there was nowhere
near as much time between the appearance of -ROM, -R, and -RW options. I
still have a 2x CD that can't read most CD-R media and can read no CD-RW
at all. I also have a 4x that can't read CD-RW at all.

+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
+ Paul Wade                         Greenbush Technologies Corporation +
+ mailto:paulwade@greenbush.com              http://www.greenbush.com/ +
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+