I have a DVD burner that does dvd-r/w as well as DVDRAM. It came with one dvdram disc, but I don’t know what to do with it.
I was hoping I could use it like a regular dvdrw for movies and whatnot, but it doesn’t seem cabaple of working in anything except it’s own dvdram drive.
Is the only point for these things just extra swap space, or what? Is there anything conceivably useful you can do with one on a desktop client running windows xp?
This site has two useful definitions of what a DVD-RAM is. I’d never heard of them before I saw this thread, in fact, and the site says rather few players support them.
If you can find a good DVD-RAM machine, you can use it like a really big floppy or a removeable hard drive. In other words, it’s rewritable removeable storage that can be written to up to 100,000 times. If you need that, however, it’s probably just easier to buy USB sticks or CD-RWs at this point.
This site is the official DVD-RAM promotion page. It will probably point to the people selling disks, machines, and possibly the things you’d need to get a disk working on a PC.
The technical specification of the DVD-RAM disc is tortuously complicated to avoid patent infringement on the +R/RW and -R/RW standards. It will only play back in a DVD player that is DVD-RAM compatible.
The seamless linking technology on +R/RW discs means they can be played back (in theory) on most ordinary DVD players.
-R/RW discs are a bit more of a pain (they use land-groove pre-pits for address and configuration data encoding, and that’s technically more difficult to deal with), but they should play back OK on any player that claims -R/RW compatibility, which is most of them now.
The only advantage I can see of DVD-RAM is that you can simultaneously access data from the same disc you’re recording to, a bit like a hard drive on a PC. But if you want to do that, you’re better off with a hard drive.
These 3 different formats (+, - , RAM) are the result of format wars between 3 different DVD consortiums. +R/RW is more popular in Europe, -R/RW is more popular in the Far East, and RAM is more popular in the US.
Near as I can tell, DVD-RAM lasted about 15 minutes in the competition against + and - R/RW discs. They were expensive, kind of slow, and required cartridges, at least initially. I’ve got one in my circa 2001 Mac G4 and it’s utterly useless to me because the discs are non-portable.
My LG drive can read and wrute DVD-RAM discs (non-cartridge).
I haven’t seen many standalone DVD players that can read DVD-RAM, but I have seen a few recorders and camcorders that can write (and presumably read) the discs.