"DVD recordable drives right now are pretty much the hottest upgrade that you can get for a home computer."
A variety of manufacturers are making external DVD burners that connect to computers through USB 2.0 or firewire ports. They are the easiest to add... but tend to be more expensive than internal drives. The drives are becoming more popular as a way to save home videos that can be shown on DVD players on TVs... .and as an inexpensive way to store up to 4.7 gigabytes of data on a disc. And while there are still drives with differing DVD standards being sold... .Brzeski says...
"This drive is actually very simple. It's designed to use the DVD forum formats, which is DVD-R, DVD-RW, that's the format that is universally recognized as being the most compatible with the installed base of home DVD players. And so basically from a user's standpoint it's easy to install and it's easy to use and there's no confusion with regards to media type."
There are drives from rivals like Sony and Iomega which can use discs for any of the competing standards. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.