On Sun, 09 Mar 2003 19:45:36 GMT, Bob Gonsalves <bgonsalves@worldnet.att.net> wrote:

>Saw the Sunday Office Max add for a Cendyne DVD Writer for $169 after

>rebates. Got to the store (Oxnard, CA) at opening and found none in

>stock. Salesperson offered a Verbatim (DVD+R, I think) drive at same

>price, but then backed off and said could order the drive. Question is,

>how could I make sure I'm getting a DVD-105 (4X) instead of the older

>DVD-104 (2X) which they could be unloading, since you can't see the

>product? The store add does not specify which model they're pushing.

> Wonder if anybody else had similar experiences.

Locally, the Office Max ad was for the Cendyne 104 (with

one mail-in, one instant rebate, for $170 - but the 105

(4X) rang up at the same price, unadvertised (it is right

now making a DVD-R disk... The included software (MyDVD)

MPEG2-encoded my Raptor DV-AVI files with the wrong

field order (no included choice of order, though); rendering

the Raptor-codec video to MS-codec video solved this, but

was time-consuming; MyDVD can encode video from the

FireWire input (OHCI card) in real time, without the field-order

problem (looks the same). Though this is one-pass (the

other included software did not work for us, and 2-pass VBR

TMPGENC kept giving us a "cannot divide by 0" error at 49%

completion...), but the results look good, with only

occasionally-evident compression artifacting...