BeigeJournal

I just purchased an HP dvd530i DVD/CD burner. This is a DVD+R, -R, +RW, -RW, +R DL, CD-R, and CD-RW drive, with up to 8x DVD+/-R, 4x DVD+/-RW, 2.4x DVD+R DL, 12x DVD-ROM, 40x CD-R, 24x CD-RW, and 40x CD-ROM speed claimed. This drive cost me $110.

I have an old 650 MHz Pentium III system running Fedora Core 2 Linux. This drive replaces an old Plextor CD-RW drive.

I never used any GUI tools for CD burning but I wanted to try out the drive quickly without learning a new set of tools for DVD burning, so I tried k3b, a GUI CD/DVD tool. With an up-to-date Fedora system with yum already in use, I needed only to type yum install k3b to get k3b. I then discovered that I needed the dvd+rw-tools, which is not in the k3b dependency list that yum uses, so yum install dvd+rw-tools installed that. I eventually discovered that if you want to burn MP3s to an audio CD automagically you’ll need the k3b-mp3 plugin: yum install k3b-mp3

There are a lot of rather bad open-source GUI tools and I’m not much of a fan in general of GUI interfaces for this sort of thing, but I am very impressed with k3b.

The main reason I wanted the drive was for backup purposes. I have an old TR-4 tape drive which has stopped working. The tape transport seems to run, but where the bits go no one knows. This drive can store 4 GB on a tape that currently costs about $32. A blank DVD+RW, holding 4.4 GB, costs around $1.40. The DVD drive is much faster, and of course disks are much easier to work with than tapes, so obviously the DVD system is far superior.

This drive, like all the newest ones, supports double-layer DVD+R DL media with twice the capacity of the usual disks, and the very latest version of the k3b software supports this, though I have not been able to actually buy any DL media yet. Once it becomes widely available I suppose this feature will be useful from time to time.

I watch few movies and have not yet bought a DVD video player. I was eager to see if I could play movies on my computer. I bought a copy of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring at Borders. In the United States it is technically a crime to play a legitimately purchased DVD on a legitimately purchased computer using unauthorized software. There are, of course, exactly zero officially licensed DVD player programs for Linux. There is some unauthorized software, however. I had thought that I might end up spending some time installing software, but it turns out everything was already installed. I just typed mplayer dvd://1 and it all worked just fine. It takes around 30% of my old 650MHz PIII to play DVDs. After I have time to actually watch the movie I’ll let you all know what I think of it. I do have to admit that the thrill of breaking the law by watching this movie with open-source software is a bit diminished by the fact that what I’m doing is paying $28.99 for a completely legitimate copy of a movie and then watching it on a computer that I paid a lot of money to buy in a completely legitimate manner. It’s hardly a bold strike against The Man. There is something wrong with the lawmaking system in the USA.

So far I’m very happy with this drive.