The State of DVD Burning Today

Once a popular necessity for making backups and burning movies, DVD Burning has lost some of it’s luster mainly due to more ways to digitize your data and store it on alternative devices. With the influx of high capacity USB Flash drives, cloud storage services, and Blu Ray media the art of DVD burning is no longer the media of choice when it comes to securing our data. But not all is lost with the DVD yet. I will explain to you how DVD’s are still used today and what the future hold for this medium.

Why DVD is Still Relevant

According to a poll conducted by Nielsen late last year which asked what are the hottest tech trends for the home, it shows that 88% of homes in the USA own at least 1 DVD player.  While this is actually in a cooling phase in growth it shows at one time how big the DVD arena was and many users are not ready to give up on this technology just yet.  The main reason is the investment in a DVD movie catalog.  In addition to that the picture quality of a DVD is acceptable enough for most viewers even on newer HDTV sets.   On PC’s and Macs it is estimated that 95% of computers have at least a DVD reader on them while the majority of these drives have a burning functionality.   So because of these stats the DVD should have a life for another 10 years at the least.

DVD Burning Software Options

Most people think of two reasons when it comes to using a DVD burner on the computer.  First and most popular is the ability to make a copy of a DVD disc, don’t get this confused with making a duplicate of a copy protected DVD which most are looking to do, but to make a second or third backup of your important files, digital photos, or other documents.  Second, people are looking to create DVD movie discs from home video content.  This is usually done with a more advanced DVD Burning Software such as an Authoring tool like MyDVD from Sonic.

Next to these more popular functions when it comes to burning discs you may find new life with your burner with these suggestions.

• Watch DVD movies on your PC or Mac – You would think that this would be a favorite function from this piece of hardware but many users have not taken to watching a DVD movie on their PC.  But with the advent to HD monitors and faster graphic cards the picture quality can be just as good as watching it in the living room.  If you have a notebook you are probably already doing this but that leads to another issue….
• Use your DVD drive to get the movie contents off of the disc thus conserving battery life on your notebook.  Watching a DVD on a notebook will wear out the battery much faster than if you were able to watch in from the hard drive.  Many DVD rippers are available that will copy the movie content from the DVD and convert it into a more portable format, thus reducing battery life and file size since it will shrink the video to under 1GB in most cases. (Normal DVD’s can be over 5gb in size)
• Use your DVD drive to read scratched or damaged discs.  There are now software options available that can extract contents off of a damaged disc.   Obviously if the disc is badly damaged then there is no recovery options available, but for slightly damaged discs there is hope available.

Looking to the future we see the hopes of Blu Ray media which can hold up to 50gb of data on a single disc. But with prices still over the $100 mark for Blu Ray hardware this is still a few years away from becoming mainstream.  We are also starting to see more cloud based backup services come to the scene which is helping in a big way for everyday data backup.  It is much better to do a virtual backup of data instead of constantly writing to new DVD blanks and throwing out the old ones.  The same can be said for USB sticks but much more portable and rewriteable.

So DVD is still going strong in certain areas and being taken over in other areas.  So go out and make your own DVD masterpiece.