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I just got a Pioneer DVR-104 DVR-R drive today. I picked it up from http://www.hypermicrosystems.com for $250 and got a 50 pack of TDK DVD-R discs at http://www.rima.com for $130 . Anybody else have one? This stuff is starting to get down into the price range of the average joe.

The main reason I got it was to backup my PS2 and Xbox games, this seems to be the drive everyone else is using. Also a single regular CD wasn't holding what I wanted to backup from my PC. Using a single disc again is really nice. Just pop the burned disc into my other DVD drive and bam there it all is just like burning a regular CD. I also plan to transfer some VHS home movies to DVD for preservation.

If you have a DVD-R drive what software do you use and what do you use the drive for? My drive came with Nero which I already had. Is there any other software I should look into?

How quick does it burn a DVD-R? These drives sure have dropped in price. $250 ain't bad, IMO. Last I knew they were about $500. Thats still a good price considering when they first came out they were somtehing like $5,000

Have fun "backing up" your PS2 games

The drive can do 2x which I believe is as fast as any DVD-R drive currently goes. Burning at 2x takes 30 min for a full DVD. Sounds slow but keep in mind the data rate and amount of data you are burning. Hopefully in a few years these things will be like CD-R drives are now.

Also at least whatever standard wins in the future (DVD-R or DVD+R) I will still be able to read my DVD-R discs. I'll just purchase whatever format burner has the most support at the time and seems like the best. Maybe someone will make a drive that does them all. Right now from everything I have seen DVD-R is in the lead due to the slow start of DVD+R. DVD-R media is also cheaper right now. The discs I got are 2x discs so they were more expensive but 1x discs can be had for under a dollar a piece.

A friend of mine just purchased one and he wanted me to help him with it. We tried to burn a movie from a avi file and it as 7.0 Gigs. Is there only 4.7 out for that kinda stuff? I have seen dvd-roms out bigger that my hard drive about 10 or more i think. Would it be ok to burn a movie on a dvd-rom or is that just for data and backing up?

They don't have drives that can do dual layer discs yet. So a single layer movie is all you are going to be able to do direct backup of. Most movies are dual layer and to back them up you are going to need to strip out the extras, extra language soundtracks, subtitles, and whatever else you can to make it fit on a disc or use two discs and split the movie.

I have read quite a bit about it in the last few days but have not actually done it myself. One of the main programs people use to rip the extras out doesn't work in XP and I'm not gonna go back to 98 just to copy a movie that I already own. It's not like they get heavy use and lay around like my games do.