"I have recently upgraded my G4 with a DVD RW Pioneer A04.
When I use 4.7 GB DVD-R media in my A04 I only get 4.2 GBs
capacity despite the 4.7 clearly printed on each disk. What's up with this?"
Good question - this one has stumped a lot of new DVD people -
The 4.7 GB on a DVD-R label really refers to "DVD" Gigabytes, which are actually Billion of Bytes (1000 x 10^9), instead of real Gigabytes (1024 x 10^9).
The actual capacity of a DVD-R disc is about 4.37 GB, if you refer to GB meaning Hard Drive storage units, not DVD's Billion of Bytes.
So be careful of how much you try to pack into that DVD project you're burning.
to make it easier, Apple has updated DVDSP 1.5 to read out the entire size of the DVD projecvy INCLUDING the DVD-ROPM content you have added. This was a "gray area" in DVDSP 1.0 - 1.2.
