M.I.5¾ wrote:
> "Rahul" <nospam@nospam.invalid> wrote in message
> news:Xns9AD2D4A1AAB546650A1FC0D7811DDBC81@207.46.2 48.16...
>> I'm always confused by DVD terminology when buying media to write on.
>> There's DVD / DVD+R / DVD-R / DVDRW and I'm not even sure which more!
>>
>> Are these all really distinct technologies and formats? Or are some
>> subsets
>> / supersets of others? Or maybe its only backward compatibility issues?
>> What's the best way to figure out what format my Laptop supports? Do they
>> have varied sizes? Does it matter whether I'm writing data or movies
>> etc.?
>> I faintly remember there being lead-in / lead-out issues....
>>
>> I've never faced the problem that I bought some commercial movie etc. on
>> a
>> DVD and my Dell Laptop ( Inspirion E1505)'s inbuilt DVD reader /writer
>> couldn't read it. Its a dual boot so are there any Linux-vs-Win issues
>> too?
>>
>> Are these distinctions only relevant when writing disks at home as
>> opposed
>> to commercially stamped disks? Or maybe when reading on hardware other
>> than
>> "computers" (etc. DVD players etc.)
>>
>>
>
> First: the easy bit. The 'R' media is write once. The 'RW' media can be
> erased allowing its re-use.
>
> A little more complex is the difference between the '-' discs and '+'
> discs.
> As far as you the user is concerned, except for some uses there is little
> to
> chose. Some older video DVD players will refuse to recognise the DVD+RW
> discs (but will recognise DVD+R). This was the result of a deliberate
> attempt by Toshiba to discourage the '+' format. Once rumbled they had to
> abandon it.
>
> For DVD-R and DVD+R, there is no practical difference other than the
> latter
> is written faster by some drives.

AND that the DVD-R discs are more compatible with some older players.
(BTDT)

> For DVD-RW and DVD+RW there is a subtle difference in that the former is
> eraseable at the block level only. The latter is eraseable at the word
> level. This means that individual words can be erased and overwritten.
> It
> also means that if used for video, more video can be added to the end of
> existing video and the two played through seemlessly. This cannot be done
> with the '-' format.
>
> If you are planning on using packet incemental format (Nero's InCD or
> Roxio's Drag-to-disc), then DVD+RW will be much more reliable than DVD-RW.

Does any truly sane person use the packet writing stuff? Too many
potential problems there. :-) InCD and DirectCD, thanks, but no
thanks.

> Every modern DVD writer supports all 4 types of disc. Some also support a
> format known as DVD-RAM which works much like any normal disc drive. This
> latter format is the only writeable DVD format that is supported by
> Windows
> XP out of the box (but beware, DVD-RAM formatted by XP isn't fully
> compatible with Vista).