Help File: Burning Question

By Rob Pegoraro,

WHY aren’t there any rewriteable double-layer DVDs? I can find dual-layer discs only in write-once formats that I can’t reuse.

Recordable DVDs can hold 4.7 gigabytes of data, and once that must have seemed like an inexhaustible capacity. But now that one year’s worth of digital photos can max out a disc, the 8.5 GB allowed by “dual-layer” discs looks a lot more attractive.

But as the questioner noted in a recent Web chat, the only dual-layer discs for sale are write-once blanks, not the more useful rewriteable kind. That’s not because DVD technology prohibits such a thing. A few years ago, the DVD Forum, which sets industry standards, approved a set of specifications for dual-layer rewriteable DVD-RW media, and the same work has been done for the competing DVD+RW format.

But other factors hold back these higher-capacity rewriteable discs—starting with high prices and limited compatibility, said Hugh Bennett, an industry consultant in London, Ontario. He said that dual-layer rewriteable discs are expensive and inefficient to make and that they don’t work in existing DVD players and drives.

Andy Marken, a spokesman for the disc vendor Verbatim, also pointed to the historically poor sales of rewriteable discs, noting that sales of write-once CDs and DVDs have outpaced those of rewriteable discs by a factor of five. That gives manufacturers little incentive to make dual-layer DVD-RW or DVD+RW formats work.

So how are you supposed to back up all of your photos? The best high-capacity backup tool remains an external hard drive that you can plug into any other machine—although it’s a good idea to keep a second backup of your most important files on a DVD or six.

Don’t let bad weather ruin your PC

THE most serious threat to your computer and other electronics today might not be a virus or spyware attack. It’s a thunderstorm—or more precisely, the sudden blackouts and power surges that lightning can cause. If you haven’t done anything to protect your equipment against this threat, it’s time. And if you haven’t checked the protective devices you bought a couple of years ago, it’s time for that, too

Help File

Recordable DVDs can hold 4.7 gigabytes of data, and once that must have seemed like an inexhaustible capacity. But now that one year’s worth of digital photos can max out a disc, the 8.5 GB allowed by “dual-layer” discs looks a lot more attractive.

Colin Firth: Anxiety Becomes Him

COLIN FIRTH is uneasy. Habitually, fortuitously so. At the moment, the actor is uneasy about his career choice: “Do grownups say, ‘Yes, the thing I most want to do is put on a frock and mince around pretending to be someone else?’ I don’t know.” It was adolescent unease that got him into the profession and proprietorial unease that nudged him into a role where he was crowned a certain sort of a king: Mr. Darcy.

Coldplay finds time to seize the moment

LOS ANGELES—Chris Martin was on the floor working out the knots. As his handlers hovered, the usually affable Coldplay singer stretched out on the carpet in a dim and airless room backstage at the Jimmy Kimmel show. It was hours before show time and the singer’s muscles were tight and his expression sour. Finally, he looked up with pleading eyes. “Can we escape? Let’s go somewhere else. Maybe some place with trees? I have a car and a driver...”

A Rapprochement Between Art Processes and Criticism

A STORY can be retold in many ways—Mercedes and Consuelo, the protagonists in Richard Abelardo’s 1950 film Ang Mutya ng Pasig, chose to recount their woes in beautiful prose and music. For Australia-based Filipino artist Alwin Reamillo, the story of his family’s involvement in the piano industry is retold in his current work, entitled The Nicanor Abelardo Grand Piano Project, at the UP Vargas Museum. The project recounts Reamillo’s personal experiences in his family’s piano-making workshop at Javencillo and Co. Inc., makers of Wittenberg pianos in the ’60s and ’70s, through  the process of restoring “disused”  pianos  and turning them into conceptual-art case instruments. Just like Consuelo and her search for her parents and her personal identity, Reamillo’s project is a personal journey through time as he continues to identify owners of disused Wittenberg pianos who are willing to sell their pianos for the restoration project, salvage materials from his father’s old workshop and trace the whereabouts of the piano technicians who were displaced by the demise of their company.