Has anyone compared the picture quality of a dvd burner vs a dvd stand alone recorder. Say you wanted to archive mini dv tapes....doesn't the burner have an advantage because the encoder software can optimize the video where as the recorder does its thing in realtime in one pass.

I have been using my computers burner with Sonic MyDVD. The quality seems pretty good but it takes a long time to transcode the original. A recorder would be much more convenient but I am wondering if I will give up picture quality.

Thoughts?

If you get a DVDr w/ DV in you're unlikely to see much PQ diff.

A standalone DVD recorder has a hardware MPEG encoder that oftentimes can out-perform most consumer-level software encoders for picture quality. Software MPEG encoding has improved in the past few years, though, so there probably is little difference other than speed. Professional-level software encoders do multipass encoding and are superior to hardware encoders.

I mostly use the standalone recorder when encoding videos from my DV camcorder. It is faster to encode, faster to do basic cuts and the quality is very good. But a standalone DVD recorder can't do the wonderful things that a movie-making application can do. It's nice to have both ways available depending on my needs.

It is good to know the dvd recorders produce quality dvd's. I guess I will stick with my burner when I want fancy menus or extensive editing.

btw...I have tried several software packages that offer video to dvd burning...no encoding downtime. The quality was relatively poor.