Do I need a DVD Player with a DVD Burner?

Newbie Forum
#1

Being completely new to dvd burning and backups please excuse my ignorance.

I plan on purchasing the ND-2500A DVD burner. My question is do I also need to purchase a standard DVD player? Currently I have a CDRW drive and a plain old cdrom reader in my computer.

I plan on replacing my CDRW with my ND-2500A, but do I also need to get a dvd player if i plan on doing any backups (wedding videos, family functions, etc) of existing dvd’s that I may have? Or do most dvd burners when doing dvd to dvd copying first write to hard drive and burn from there. Just trying to determine if I need to spend the extra 30 bucks or so to get the dvd player along with my dvd burner?

If I should get a dvd player, can anyone recommend a good one?

Thanks

#2

Just stick with the one drive and copy to your hard drive before burning to your DVD/R - no need to spend the money for an extra drive.

#3

Just go with the one drive and copy to your hard drive. There isn’t really any advantage to having a second dvd drive.

#4

If you plan on copying a lot get a DVD-ROM as well as the NEC writer.
The DVD-ROM will rip to your hard drive much quicker than a writer,you can also copy on the fly. You can set it up so both disc’s are in the drives click copy, walk away until its finished no swapping disc’s.
Recommended DVD-ROM Liteon 166.
If your not planing to copy much stick to the NEC.

#5

I heard the Liteon 166 is very noisy. Any truth to that?

#6

Yes compared to the NEC but its the best reader.

#7

Also the nec drives are considered to be poor readers espeicailly with dirty / scratched dvd’s.

#8

The point is…it’s a matter of preference. As you’ve read above…you don’t really “need” another optical drive. The DVD burner you are looking into is also a cdr burner as well as a dvd reader/cd reader.

As one post above indicates, most stand alone dvd-roms are faster rippers, but your burner will do rips fine as well.

Long story short, how apeshit do you want to go? How many optical drives can your box support? Most boxes have a hard limit of 4 EIDE internal drives without an add on card (hdd’s and optical, mix and match). Personally, I’d stick with 2 good opticals (1 excellent ripper, 1 excellent burner) and leave the other 2 open 2 hdd space to dump those rips.

Granted, if you have a newer board with SATA, you have more options, so long as your case has room and your ps has the juice to power it all up…clear as mud?? :slight_smile:

#9

Ok all the information posted in regards to your question is all very good, how ever consider this.

A DVD player is about 30 to 40 bucks a good burner is about $140 bucks and up, if you are going to be busy Ripping and Burning split the work load out between the two, ripping on the cheap on using the more expensive drive for burning, this way you will add life to your burner.

That’s just my “Frugal Point”

lvlr_yack

#10

Again, while this good advice…it means your cdr comes out of the box to be replaced by a dvd-rom, unless you have a spare machine you want migrate it to, or have more than dual EIDE on the board, you must consider this.

To be honest, if i were to build a machine just for backing up dvd’s, I’d have a good dvd rom, a good dvd burner, and a couple large hard drives…running under an os that recognized ntfs as the default partions…:slight_smile: