I just received this burner today. I ordered it mainly to export my animation to DVD. Anyway, I am also interested in burning DVD movies and getting them to play on my home dvd player. So how do I go about doing this? I have a Pinnacle DVD500 capture card, would this help? Also, what's the best software out there for doing this? My os is windows 2000. Any help would be grealy appreciated. Chui
Try DVDxCopy. It costs money ($99.00) but is easy to use. It does lack some of the feature/track stripping functions of some of the less intuitive programs, but it is very easy to use and constantly under improvement by 321 studios. I have a Sony 500a too, and it works great. Backed-up about 20 movies so far with no coasters. If you are playing your back-up copies on a set-top dvd player, make sure it is capable of playing DVD-R's or DVD+R's.
You can have two DVD drives, one read - one write, if it is properly installed (just like CD-ROMs). I have a DVD-Rom (read) drive and the DRU500A drive (burner). Both work fine together (Windows XP).
chui1675, I too have the sony burner, and it works great, make sure you get the firmware upgrade. I use dvddecrypter to rip, ifoedit to strip and split if necessary, and nero to burn. I haven't paid a penny for any additional software, but using so many different programs there is a learning curve. Doom9 is a great source of information for using these programs.
mnmeater: How satisfied are you with the Nero software? Have you had any problems so far? Also, when you installed Nero, did that "replace" the RecordNow software that came with your Sony burner (DRU500A)? Using Xcopy I have had no problems making movie backups, but I also have some mpeg2 files that I would like to make DVD compliant and burn to DVD. I understand that Nero can do this. Any comments or suggetions? Thanks.
Nero works great and is easy to use, I haven't had a conflict or error message yet. I read alot in the forums, and one point I picked up was everyone had problems if they installed the recording software that came with the Sony dru-500, so the only software from sony that I installed was Powerdvd and have not had problems with that. As for working with MPEG2 files, that's something I don't mess with, better that you post another thread.
Risky: I also have the sony dru-500a and put some of the garbage "bundled" software that was included and realized I needed much more. I took off some programs, leaving MyDVD on there just in case. I use dvddecrypter to rip, ifoedit to , well edit my iso's and Nero 5.10 to burn. NO PROBLEMS AT ALL YET. Only done a few so far, but I haven't got any conflicts between nero and other burning software. AB
