Did I just miss it's heyday, or is DVD+RW DL the middle child of the DVD family?

[super_audio_cd]

Purchased a Pioneer BDR-2212 recently, great 'last hurrah' drive if you're looking for BDXL support.

Anyway, I was surprised to see DVD+RW DL listed as incapable in drive specifications. Thinking it was a bug, check the Pioneer specsheet, and sure enough, no read or write on DVD+RW DL. But reads every flavor of dash DVD, DVD+R DL and single layer DVD+RWs.

Look through some of Pioneer and LG's older models, no DVD+RW DL support either.

Is DVD+RW DL a format that simply lost ground to DVD-RW DL and was never implemented? Reliability issues? Drive manufacturer turf war?

I would appreciate an explanation.

[LIGHTNING UK!]

I don’t recall them ever actually releasing rewritable dual/double layer dvd media. I guess they had their reasons for that, but I’m afraid I don’t know what they were.

[super_audio_cd]

Swear I've seen them around somewhere- must be losing it. Good to know my drive theoretically would support a nonexistent format. Any day now, DVD Forum.

If I was to guess, with Blu-Ray being unveiled as early as 2002, engineering an entirely new re-writable DVD format wouldn't make much economic sense. Hence the DL/TL BD-REs. But who knows, with PC BR adoption being so low, maybe an 8GB re-writable DVD would've found it's niche among legacy users who were tired of DVD-R DL coasters.

[dbminter]

Both types were announced, but never actually went into production.

 

Some specifications for them must have actually be finalized and released, though, because things like DVDInfo were designed to report if a drive supported those types of media.

 

See the last entry here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_recordable#Dual_layer

 

[super_audio_cd]

10 hours ago, dbminter said:

Some specifications for them must have actually be finalized and released, though, because things like DVDInfo were designed to report if a drive supported those types of media.

Did a bit of research on both the +RW DL and -RW DL formats.

As for -RW DL, JVC appears to have gotten quite far. I found this product page for their VD-W85As, and what appears to be a concept disc given to the press. The discs had no MSRP, and I'm not entirely sure if they were ever actually released. The archived product page missing all of the images suggests to me it was taken down rather quickly though. The specification technically exists, but the discs never went into mass production. Must explain why drives are listed as '-RW DL compatible'.

Even looking through some of the archived dvdrw.com pages and some of their old press releases I have found nothing relating to +RW DL excluding the Wikipedia reference to the specification book. Lost to time I suppose.