[Malt Magics]

here's the conundrum fellas:

I've just purchased a new G5 iMac, and I've been burning DVDs and CDs for a few weeks now. But I've noticed that the blank media for each comes in well under what is supposedly contained—though I know there's always a bit of a dip—but not to the extent as compared to PC users I know. For example:

one 4.7GB DVD only registers 4.29GB

or

one 700MB CD only has the available capacity of 660MB of a 670MB capacity

Of course, these numbers seem too low for the usual dip to expect in any storage media, and was wondering why this was. Is it because of the hardware on the G5 or is it because it's mac in general? Many PC friends have 4.7GB DVDs and their DVDs register at 4.5-4.6GB

of course, that extra 200-300MB or so would come in handy.

my real question is, is there anything I can do about this? It makes burning complicated, particularly if I borrow burned DVDs or CDs from PC friends that I want to copy.

anyhow, thanks.

[SVass]

Actually, one guy's 4.29 is another's 4.6. These things are counted in strange ways. Put another way, 1 kilobyte is actually 1024 bytes. One megabyte is 1024 times 1024 or more than one million, et cetera. PC people count differently than Mac people so I would suggest that you test one of their 4.6 gigabyte dvds and see if you can copy it. Note Mactheripper and other freeware applications will allow you to copy dvds. Popcorn (from Roxio) will both compress and write them. sam

[Malt Magics]

hey thanks for the info,

though that's precisely what happened.

a friend gave me a burned DVD to test the quality, which was excellent, and I decided to make a copy of it to save meyself the time to compress it, and found it was too big. it was 4.6 GB and therefore would not fit on my supposed 4.7 GB, but actual 4.29 GB.

so it sounds like there's not much to do about it.

thanks though