[NCLUG] Copying a personal DVD

Stephen Warren swarren at wwwdotorg.org
Wed Jul 23 13:54:48 MDT 2008


On Wed, July 23, 2008 10:28 am, bsimpson at att.net wrote:
> I recorded some stuff onto a DVD+R
> ...
> Also I would like to
> copy to an archival quality DVD (100+ years longevity)
> but all of the archival quality DVDs I've seen are DVD-R.
> Is it straight forward to copy video (originating from
> a VHS tape) from a DVD+R to a DVD-R?  (The DVD doesn't
> just have video, there is also a simple menu with title
> selection, and I don't know if the formats are compatible.)

The physical media (DVD +/- R/RW/ROM) is mainly completely orthogonal to
the data format stored on the disc (e.g. DVD-VIDEO, DVD+VR, ...)

DVD-Video (all commercial DVDs, and some portion of home-made/recorded
DVDs) will go onto any DVD media, space permitting (i.e. if you make a
dumb copy of a dual-layer source, you'll need to use dual-layer
destination media).

Some DVD recorders (most notably live VCR-style video recorders, rather
than "offline" DVD creation software) generate a format known as (I think)
DVD+VR. This data format is basically regular DVD-Video (hence regular
players can play it) with some extra data and file layout specifications
used by the video recorder for space management etc.

I'm not 100% sure if DVD+VR format data will go onto non "plus" media or
not. My inclination is that it'll work there just fine, but it'll lose
some DVD+VR specific data, so that if you later copied it back to "plus"
media, your DVD recorder wouldn't be able to add to it.




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