Pictured to the right is my new toy, a Pioneer DVR 106 DVD±RW Burner. I wanted to get a DVD drive for the computer so that I could do screen grabs for film reviews and scene analysis (for instance, it would help a great deal to have screenshots on my scene analysis of Rear Window), but when I looked into it, I found out that DVR drives were shockingly inexpensive. In fact, it cost approximately $100 less than my CD Burner (which I bought several years ago, when they hadn’t yet become commonplace). For the record, a simple DVD ROM drive is also shockingly inexpensive, but the added functionality in a DVR drive seemed worth the price.
3 thoughts on “My New Toy”
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Oooooooooh! If the prices are good now I may just go grab one myself soon. I haven’t been following DVD writer prices, as I didn’t really think I would be burning DVDs much but that may be changing and it would at least be a cool option to have.
I know you said it’s new. Have you done much with it yet? I have a Pioneer CD player in my car and I’m very happy with it. I’m just generally very wary about what brand of drive I should get for something.
I’ve not done much, actually. When I bought the drive, I neglected to realize that no blank DVDs came with it, so I haven’t even tested that portion of it. About all I’ve done with it is watch some movies and attempt to take some screenshots (unsuccessfully, I might add). It only came with some burning software (Nero), no players, which is somewhat annoying… so I downloaded some GNU licensed player, which seems to work well, but again, I can’t seem to take screenshots. I’ll probably also want to take short clips of movies too, but I’m not at all sure how to do so. My audio/video computer knowledge is actually pitifully low, so I’ll need to do some reading up on that.
On that note, if anyone has any info they think’d help, it would be much appreciated:)
Well, I know Windows seems to have some issue with taking screenshots of a video if hardware acceleration is enabled through the player. With both Windows Media Player and PowerDVD (which isn’t even an MS product), I’ve had to go into the options and shut off hardware acceleration on playback before being able to capture anything via the alt+prnt scrn method.
I didn’t notice any difference in the video quality but it was quite some time ago when I did this. I’ve recommended this method to someone since then and she says it made Windows Media Player’s playback absolutely suck (but it did the trick and she was able to get what she was after so I assume the image still appeared as it should, playback was probably just really choppy).