The optical platters you've known and loved as "compact discs" have been pumped up. The new buzz is for rewritable discs, which are rapidly replacing the old "write-once" discs, and why not? Now you can record on CDs over and over again. CD-R drives are giving way to CD-RW drives, which can erase and record CDs. Anything but the seriously budget-minded consumer ought to insist on a CD-RW drive in their new purchase. The PC mavens are predicting the death of CD-RWs in favor of rewritable DVDs as the costs of the new technology goes down, but you and I both know that CD burning is here for a good long time. If you're buying a new PC and price isn't a sticking point, you should opt for a rewritable DVD drive, but don't think that CD-RW technology is going away just yet.

As for DVDs, you're seeing that technology rapidly joining VCR/VHS for mass-market video reproductions, but there are plenty of computers sporting DVD technology today. Although standards are still unsettled, there's some order to the various flavors available. Here's the buzz on the various formats:

• DVD-R is a write-once format, and features a relatively huge -- 4.7GB, as opposed to 700MB for standard CD-R discs -- storage capacity. Currently DVD-R discs are compatible with about 85% of available drives and players. DVD+R discs are quite similar.
• DVD-RW discs can record, and are rewritable. Good for backups, DVDs, and movies, and compatible with about 65% of drives and players. DVD+RW drives are similar, but much faster.
• DVD-RAM is another recordable, rewritable standard developed by Panasonic (rapidly falling out of favor).
• DVD-ROM drives only read. Another format that's falling out of favor.
• DVD-Video disks are currently used only in commercial movie theaters.

New technologies on the horizon: FMD-ROM (Fluorescent Multilayer Disk) drives, which are purported to be able to store up to 20 hours of HDTV data (DVD currently stores up to 18 hours). Predictions are that FMD disks will eventually store up to a terabyte of data. Note: technowonk John Dvorak is predicting that DVD+RW will finally win out in the format wars, because Sony and Philips are on the same page, joined by Mitsubishi and at least 5 other companies. Dvorak is by no means infallible, but his opinion is worth mentioning.) We're still waiting to see what the newest flavor, DVD+R, provides. At the moment, the DVD-R format is the most popular, but this may well change. Look for the first DVD-R 2X drives to appear in early 2003. And give an ear to DVD-Audio discs; their audio reproduction is clearly superior to the average CD, but you won't be able to play them on older sound cards.

Look for new DVD players to combine formats.

The new furor over copy-protection is directly impacting CD-RW and DVD technology. At this writing, no one is sure which formats will be hit the hardest, but there's sure to be fallout, and those of you who bought (or will buy) into formats that copy-protecting renders obsolete are going to be ticked off. Digital rights management, or DRM, is any of a host of technological roadblocks designed to restrict your usage of your digital media. Generally, it means that buyers of digital media may not be able to use copyrighted material in ways that the copyright owners deem unfit. It's not precisely copy protection; you may be able to make as many copies of a music CD or movie DVD as you like, but you might have problems running it in your computer or yuor audio/video system. An example is the DRM included in Intuit's Quicken TurboTax 2002, which comes with a product key that can only be used once without permission from Intuit. The idea is to keep you from copying the program onto a second computer; the reality is that if the program corrupts itself, you can't reinstall it. DVD encryption tried to stop DVDs from being played in "unauthorized viewers;" a program called DeCSS cracks that scheme, though it may be illegal to use the program in the United States. (Think that's stopping anyone?)

In these ugly days of copy protection, there are some things you just can't do (or legally shouldn't do) with digital media that you'd like to do. Ripping (making MP3 copies of music CDs) is generally OK as long as you don't share the files with anyone else; however, if the music is already copy-protected, you may not even be able to do that. You can override the copy protection on CDs, either with software or sometimes with nothing more than a black marker, but it violates DMCA regulations and has some hefty punishment allocated to it. So far the music industry says it doesn't intend to press charges against individuals, though. Swapping files through file-sharing networks such as Kazaa or Morpheus is OK as long as you don't trade copyrighted files -- if you do, your ISP can cancel your account, you could be subject to legal action, and, if the Berman bill passes, the music industry may try to make it more difficult for their copyrighted files to be shared. Again, individuals like you and me have little to fear...yet. Recording TV broadcasts using VCRs, TiVo, DVD recorders, and the like is OK, but in the future, a proposed "broadcast flag" for digital TV may limit such copying. As for skipping commercials during recording, that's OK, but TV networks have sued the makers of ReplayTV for such practices; as I write this, the court case is pending. You can share a tape of a recorded TV show with someone else under the Fair Use guidelines, as long as you don't show it to a large audience and you don't charge a fee. ReplayTV's "send it to a friend" feature is being challenged in court. Lastly, it's impossible to play DVDs bought in Europe or Asia on an American DVD player or vice versa, due to incompatible copy protection schemes. Note: People are now reporting that copy-protected audio CDs are damaging their computers as well as performing unwanted system changes. Be aware.

Some notes about authoring DVDs:

• Analog videos (analog 8mm and VHS) must be converted to digital format before they can be burned to DVD. Video-capture devices (internal or external) can connect your camcorder or VCR to your PC. Some capture devices even perform the conversion in hardware. Others ship with conversion software.
• Digital video camcorders that can also read analog tapes (typically 8mm) perform the conversion on the fly and send a digital stream directly to your PC.
• USB 1.1, which has throughput of about 11 MBps, is not fast enough for high-quality video capture. High-quality video (30 frames per second with 24-bit color at a resolution of 640 by 480) requires throughput of at least 210 MBps to maintain quality and not drop frames. USB 2.0 works at speeds up to 480 MBps and FireWire (IEEE 1394) can run at 400 MBps.
• You'll need lots of free hard drive space to work with digital video. Even if you use one-step DVD-creation tools, the software will cache the video on your system's hard drive before burning the DVD. Two hours of high-quality digital video usually takes up nearly 4GB of hard drive space.
• Digital video tapes hold one hour of high-quality video. 8mm analog tapes are typically two hours long and VHS-C analog tapes are usually one hour long.
• Most consumer DVD authoring and burning products can fit just one hour of high-quality MPEG-2 video onto a DVD.
• Most DVD authoring tools allow you to record to DVD at lower bit rates (which means image quality is likely to be somewhat reduced), so you can fit up to two hours of video on a DVD.
• Many set-top DVD players cannot play DVDs that have been written at lower bit rates.
• Don't be confused by one-step or automatic DVD-creation software promises. They can do their work with little user intervention, but the time it takes to encode video and burn a DVD can be quite lengthy. Encoding, compiling, and burning a one hour DVD can easily take two hours.
• Many set-top DVD players will play DVD-R discs only, not DVD-RW or DVD+RW discs. Check the manufacturer's Web site for details since this information is not always listed in the manual, especially with older models of players.

And some info about copying DVDs: You can copy data DVDs all day long, but commercial entertainment DVDs (i.e. movies) can't be copied, both because of legal proscriptions and because of CSS (Content Scrambling System). If you have a CSS decryption program, several courts have ruled that you can't legally use them to burn copies of commercial DVDs. There's an argument to be made that under the Fair Use section of copyright law, we should be allowed to burn copies of DVDs for our personal use, and courts are considering these arguments as I type this. However, the bare facts are that most manufacturers won't bother with us little fish, so we can burn all the "illegal" copies we want. Just as long as we don't sell them, we should be fine. (Not that I'm advocating you breaking the law. The law here is as yet unclear. But if you don't feel comfortable doing this, then don't!) Probably the best program for our use is 321's DVD X Copy, a $99 direct program that transfers the data bit for bit from the original DVD to a rewritable disc. Programs from vendors like Roxio and Pinnacle work, but they don't decrypt CSS; instead, they let you burn DVDs from data stored on your hard drive. Some shareware programs such as DVD Decrypter (www.dvddecrypter.com/ also copy DVDs, but don't expect them to be easy to figure out. (Note that while some programs claim to be able to copy video games, doing this is strictly illegal, and tough to carry out due to a plethora of copy-protection schemes on the discs.) It's also possible to copy DVDs to CD-Rs, but it's a tricky, unsatisfactory, and time-consuming process which I won't go into here.

Win XP/2K users, here's a digital audio tip. You used to pipe the CD signal through the sound card by using an audio cable connecting the drive to the sound card. Today, many systems have multiple optical drives, and one cable isn't enough. It's easy to fix: just enable digital audio. Right-click on My Computer, then choose Manage. Select Device Manager from the left-hand pane. Navigate to the properties box for each of your CD, DVD, CD-RW, or DVD-RAM drives, and check the box "Enable digital audio."

Want to use DVDs to back up your data? It can be done, but you'll need the proper software, such as the $80 Backup NOW! program from www.ntius.com/. Whichever program you use, make sure it offers support for your particular flavor of DVD, it supports itself with driver updates, it's able to perform incremental and differential backups, it can make image (bit-for-bit duplicate) backups, it has bootable disk support, it provides automatic backup scheduling, it offers password protection, it can span multiple disks, it can compress data files, and if you're really hardcore, it offers drive spanning.

For those of us with audio and video catalogs on our computers, look for a new open standard called MusicPhotoVideo, or MPV, which is a universal method for organizing, recording, and naming music, photo, and video files. The MPV file will provide a table of contents on storage media such as CDs, flash memory cards, and DVDs. A device must be MPV-enabled to recognize the file. Look for the first MPV-enabled devices to hit the market by the last part of 2003.

A nice source of info for DVDs is "Understanding DVD Formats" at www.dvdirect.com/TSS/charts/DVDFormats.htm.