DVD Writer

A DVD -12 cm in diameter - is an example of storage media capable of storing a minimum of 4.7 gigabytes (GB) of information. This is equal to a three-hour movie of very good quality, or ten episodes on television, or approximately 15 hours of home video. Widely used DVD formats include DVD-Recordable and DVD-Rewritable, which is a rewritable version of the DVD.

A DVD burner, which is also known as a DVD writer is a device that is used to code or "burn" information on DVDs. The DVD burners were highly priced earlier, but for sometime now, the prices of both internal and external DVD writers, have fallen sharply.

A DVD recordable/rewritable has a recording layer which is an organic dye. A DVD writer burning laser, of greater intensity than a regular DVD reading laser, impresses patterns into the dye, letting the data to be read. A rewritable DVD will use a special metal alloy and not a dye. Even though DVDs can be rewritten many times, data quality suffers if the DVD is rewritten once too often.

DVD burner has come very close to replacing the CD burner. Its low cost some years ago aroused the interest of even the non-geeks. DVDs and DVD burners are used very often to transfer or back-up video formats which normally take up a lot of storage space; special DVD writer software is available for authoring Video DVDs. A DVD writer can write at a maximum of 16x, transferring data at 21 Mbs per second.