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Creative PC-DVD 8482
by psyborg
I bought this DVD-RAM drive for data storage at work and it does the job perfectly. Disks are quite expensive to buy but give good value/MB compared to other media and most importantly for me they are very reliable, I could have bought a huge hard drive for the price but they just aren't as reliable long-term. The ... disks are double-sided and come in a case, you can buy single-sided 2.6GIG disks that can be read in some, but not all DVD-ROM drives. So wouldn't be very usefull if you wanted to copy movies etc.. for your friends.
Panasonic and Lacie have now brought out 9.4GIG DVD-RAM drives, creative may well have also. So if your going to buy go for 9.4 gig. I'm sure the price of disks and the drives themselves will fall over time so if your planning to get one for personal use I would hold out for six months and keep an eye on prices.
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Creative PC-DVD Encore 6x
by Nibelung
I have been using the Creative 6x DVD-ROM with its accompanying mpeg decoder card for about a year now. Initially, this was to be my gentle let-in to DVD movies. However, avarice got the better of me, and I bought a stand-alone DVD player as well! The PC based solution was easy to install, and worked first time, both as a ... CD/DVD-ROM and for playing DVD movies. The movie action created via the MPEG decoder card is very smooth unlike some software decoders I have seen running on entry-level machines, and the software emulates a remote control in appearance.
Inevitably (for me, that is) I started to get interested in being able to watch Region 1 DVDs imported from the States. I had heard of all sorts of dire things that happened if you tried to tweak your player to play other than Region 2, like your DVD locking up and having to be sent to the makers to be reset.
However, I found some regional software called Remote Selector which a very reasonably-priced piece of shareware. This enables you to alter the Region prior to playing, and is universal for Regions 0-6.
Another advantage of a hardware decoder, is that it has a TV output, in this case an S-Video socket which comes with a step-down lead to make it a composite output as well.
One little used feature of the Creative software is the ability to force an NTSC DVD to produce a PAL output. In theory, this enables you to copy American disks to a British-market VCR, but I never told you that! The copies can be a little jerky as the machine ditches several frames from the higher frame rate of NTSC to synch it up with PAL, but is not too noticeable except on “panning shots”.
Aha, you say, but what about the anti-copying software coding? Well, the Remote Selector software has a “Disable Macrovision” option. Nuff said.
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Creative PC-DVD Encore 6x
by Silent Bob
I bought this piece of hardware to watch my DVDs on before I stumped up the cash to buy my stand-alone player, Boy was it a good choice. Having your DVD set up through your PC is good as the monitor can usually offer a better resolution can any TV and hence gives you a better and more detailed picture and with monitors anything up to ... 30" available its a good thing. This package helps the picture on your computer monitor be better than usual becuase it contains a hardware player and not just software, it comes with the Dxr3 PCI card which is a hardware decoder thus improving picture and play quality on your PC.
Installing the unit into your PC is very easy and its just a case of opening up the case and sliding the unit into the correct place, All I had to do was put the card in, screw the drive into the front 5.25" bay, and connect the ribbon cable and CD AUDIO cables. The back of the card has S-VIDEO output so that you can watch your DVDs on your television.
The Dxr3 card is a good thing as it is designed for this, and thats always better than letting your computers processor do all the calculation. Thus the inclusion of the Dxr3 card increase the value of this package, so even a computer with a low-end processor could play the DVds with good quality with this card. The audio and video sync is very good and the software included it very stylish and easy to use. You get a pop-up remote control that plays next to the film window or at the bottom of the screen if the film is in full scrren mode. With the PC-DVD system, you use your mouse pointer to select menu items. This came in handy for selecting an Easter Egg menu selection that used to take a lot of monkeying around to get selected using a regular DVD player remote control.
The price is good at around £150 (when I bought it a while ago) and is well worth it, even though you could buy the Proline 1000 stand alone player for that. Both the Proline and the Creative labs players ar
e hackable, so you can watch other region DVDs on them. For the Creative Labs its easier to install a new player and then you download a piece of software called Zone Selector and use this to launch your player.
I am very satisfied with this product. This is a very sturdy product that does what it says it does. I have not found a problem that I could not fix. Everything works like it is supposed to, the installation was very easy, and the dvd-rom has not stopped working. This dvd-rom has worked with all the latest software out there, so no need on worrying that it is outdated. The only thing is that sometimes region 1 DVD seem to freeze and my computer crahes but when installed in my brothers computer we do not get this problem at all.
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