Sony's DRU-510A DVD recorder

A FEW DAYS AGO, I finally took the plunge and picked up a DVD recorder. Having had a CD-R since the 1x, pre-Win95 days, this one wasn't a big leap, or a technological challenge. I was waiting for the drives to mature a little before I spent the money to buy one. I will admit to being a bit gun shy, especially after installed three Pioneer A03 and A04s for people, and having them all die in less than a year. It wasn't a happy thing, especially at the prices those old DVD-R units commanded.

Surveying the market, there are two competing standards, DVD-R(W) and DVD+R(W). A quick trip to any optical media site says that passions are heated, religious wars are in full swing, and there is no clear winner yet.

When Sony introduced it's first +/- drive, my ears perked up. Finally, someone with the sense to step above the fray and do the right thing. The downside is that they had a unique position in the market, knew it, and charged accordingly. Sure, licensing two recording formats costs a bit more, but this drive had a $100 premium. To make matters worse, the premium only increased when the single format drives dropped in price, and the Sony stayed at $350. The second generation Sonys came out a short while ago, and they were again priced at $350. almost a 100 per cent premium over the cheapest single format drive.

Then a miracle happened in the form of free market competition, a blizzard of other companies came out with +/- drives, and almost overnight, the Sony price started dropping. It was time to take the plunge.

A trip to the local Best Buy showed three available drives, Sony, TDK and Verbatim. Avoiding the sales force was the hard part of the problem, the decision was easy. All three manufacturers have a decent reputation, there was no product on the shelf that made me say ‘Who?' and scratch my head, the days of Sun Moon Star are mercifully past us.

Looking over the boxes, they TDK and the Verbatim all offered the same paper specs, 4x R write, 2/2.4 RW write, and a variety of CD options. No clear winner there. On to the software choices. One of them, the Verbatim if memory serves, had a white sticker on the box proudly letting me know it bundeled a ‘software selection'. I know deadlines are a bitch in the fast paced hardware industry, and things change all the time, but doesn't it take more time to master and make a CD than it takes to print a black and white text label? Confidence shattered, I moved on. The TDK proudly advertised the EZCD, or is it EZDVD now, version 6. Not good either.

Let me explain a bit here. When I got my first CD-R for a mere $1700 in the dark days of 1993, or was it 1994, it came with Corel CD Creator. Shortly after that, Windows95 was released to the general public, and CD Creator got really flaky. Coastering a large amount of $12 blanks in not fun when you are a destitute college student, and waiting 74 minutes for the privilege only adds to the enjoyment. A call to Corel told me I would be paying an huge fee to upgrade to the new Win95 version of this exotic, 3 month old software. Not a chance. That was when I was introduced to EZCD, long before the Adaptec buyout and the later Roxio spinoff. It was a pleasure, it worked, did everything I needed, and until v4, just got better and better.

Then they started playing games. No new recorder updates for older software. and DRM, just what every free thinking individual needs. Does it get better? Yes, wizards, animated ‘control panel' interfaces, and other things to slow you down if you had a clue. With enough time and effort, you could manage to avoid most of this, but each successive update made it more oppressive an annoying. Those of us who like a simple, clean, and functional interface were out of luck. The newest Plextor recorder wasn't supported by EZCD, so I had to upgrade, and I just could not get 5.0 to work with the recorder I had, no matter what I did. In desperation, I tried Nero, and realized what I had been missing. Nero was the anti-EZCD and I never looked back.

This episode was very prominent in my mind when I saw the wizards on that TDK box. On to the Sony. The Sony had a large selection of software, both for recording and playback. They offered the Veritas suite, and Sonic's MyDVD. I had used the Veritas suite with one of the early Pioneers, and had vague memory of no worse than adequacy. Having never done any video editing, I had no clue about the Sonic software, but how bad could it be? Sony DRU-510A took the day.

Getting the box home, I eagerly opened it up and dug in. Installing the hardware was simple. If you can put in any generic IDE device, you will have no problem with this drive, it plugs in, and XP recognizes it as a DVD-R. The only admittedly minor bitch I have is that there was no analog audio cable included. This is really picking nits, but something that you would excuse in a $39 generic CD-R drive is harder to overlook in a $350 branded drive. Other than that, it there were no problems, and one good point.

The good point is the face plate. I was ‘gifted' with a case a few months ago by someone who got sick of hearing me talk about how cases for were for the weak, and real men had motherboards on their desks. I say ‘gifted' because it is one of the most embarrassing cases I have ever seen. Think blue tinted plastic faceplate, side windows, gold plated fans, and the works. Bling bling. Add in that the construction is cheap as hell, and you have a real winner, but it silenced the high RPM fan whine, and was free, so I went with it. Nothing matched this beast. You could put in beige, black, or whatever faceplates, and they all stuck out, making me look much less like the playa I be. The Sony fit right in. It has a clear plastic over silver accented face that looks right at home on this beast. I was impressed.

Once I got everything installed, I skipped the MusicMatch Jukebox thank you, and went through the obligatory 9 reboots, things again simply worked. There has got to be something wrong, so I set out to find it. A DVD-R is just a CD-R with more capacity. The fact that there are millions of home units that happen to read the format, and play movies off of them is just a bonus. It is all data to the drive, the only difference is how it is formatted. Time for the torture test.

How do you make software explode? You find it's limits and exceed them To this effect, I started on Veritas RecordNow DX v4.60. Let's get the bad part out of the way right now, avoid this software at all costs. Why? When you set up a data CD, it presents you with a lined interface to which you can drag and drop files. When you do, as is shown in the screenshot, you get a handy list of relative paths, paths and folders that show you just about everything you need about the to and from portion of the DVD. The inexcusable problem comes in if you want to put things in a subdirectory. For example, say you wanted to put the powerpoint and word directories into a office directory, you would just create the directory, and drag them into it. No such luck. After 45 minutes of trying and reading that damnable blight on computers, HTML manuals, I found that you had to double click on the relative path, and MANUALLY EDIT it. That is a process that will fly well with 100 directories. What were they thinking? Corel CD Creator was more advanced in 1993. For that alone, this software is worthless to me, and will be replaced as soon a Nero 6 comes out in a few days. Even EZCD 6 would be a step up, at least that would be functional.

In the defense of RecordNow, the software passed the recording test with only minor annoyances. I picked a folder with a lot of pictures, all thumbnailed and organized. Remember, this is a torture test, so there were over 140,000 images comprising 4.45GB out of a possible 4.5GB. It took over half an hour to compile the disk and start the burn, where the other annoyance hit. It got done caching, copying, organizing, and whatnot, when it presented me with the error ‘media does not contain enough space for the requested operation' or some similar error, basically the formatting overhead was more than 50MB, and that put me over the limit. Fair enough, but did you have to compile the whole disk before this was apparent? Come on people, Nero, EZCD, and even CloneCD does this as soon as you hit the record button, is it all that complicated?

On the good side, when the burn actually started, it blew through the recording without a problem. All 4.2GB of the new, downsized, disk burned without a hitch, and read fine on all computers that I could test it on. If there is a more severe test than filling the drive with 50K files, I can't think of one, so on the barest functional level, this program works quite well.

Moving on to the DVD movie burning section, I ran into other problems. First, the Sonic software isn't smart enough to convert PAL mpegs to NTSC, it just throws up a warning, and won't select the file. Not encouraging. I am sure there are tools out there that do this with ease, but since they are not included, I was stuck.

The planned torture test, pulling all the movies I saved from the internet over the years, onto one DVD didn't go all that well. I dragged these 425 or so nuggets of humor onto the Sonic MyDVD 4.5 and looked on with curiosity. To my horror, an ‘adding movie' dialog popped up, and 15 seconds later, another one popped up. It took about 5 minutes to work through the numbered movies and start on the ones beginning with ‘a'. I went and got dinner.

When I came back, there was no Sonic MyDVD running. I concluded from that that the limit of movies that this program can handle is 424 or less. Sorting by size, I tried again, picking the top 50 movies. Surely a mere 1GB wouldn't melt the software. Wrong. It added the files, but the burn button was curiously greyed out.. Not a good thing once again.

Moving on to a lesser task, I grabbed a VCD I had lying around and copied a full length, 90 minute mpeg off of it, and tried to make a DVD out of it. It added the file quickly and easily, and showed a thumbnail of the first few frames. I figured putting a chapter break every 10 minutes or so would make for a reasonable test. How do you do that again? No button, tutorial is a also a waste of time. This is not good.

The embedded movie editor ArcSoft Showbiz should do this if MyDVD doesn't. Firing that up, I had no luck. Breaking down, and looking at the help, I found this helpful anecdote buried in the MyDVD help system:
"Note: Only clips you have recorded in MyDVD and clips recorded in Philips DVD video recorders can contain chapter points. You cannot add chapter points to clips created in other applications."

Wow, can you get more stupid than that? I mean really, a good deal of the point of DVD is the chapter format, now why can't you simply select them in the handy little timeline feature. I may be missing a technical difficulty or 3 here, but really now, is it all that much of a leap to expect something like this in a software ostensibly for DVD creation?

Knowing that helpful point, it makes the software all of useless to me. Once again, this one goes into the trash as soon as I find something better. Again, without trying to be to negative, it did burn that 90 minute movie as promised, and put an animated menu behind it. If I want to show someone something 78 minutes in, I will be in for a long fast-forward session though.

Overall, the Sony gets an 7/10 for the DRU-510A hardware. It installed well, handled a bunch of disk types without a hitch, and had no problems. The price was a tad high, and nothing stood out as exceptional, it was just a solid product that performed as expected.

On the software side, it rates a 2/10. Why so high you ask? It would have scored much lower, but I simply could not blow up or overload RecordNow DX. Getting it to format the DVD was as much fun as gum surgery, adding a score of 0 to the total. The video editing software basically didn't. Unlike the data side, the help told me I wasn't missing anything, so that software adds a big 0 points also.

If I had to do it all again, I would probably go with the Verbatim drive. It was cheaper, and didn't promise any software I don't like. Who knows, it just might be good software, it sure can't be worse. µ