Thinkcorps

There’s a ton of confusion out there about which DVD formats do what, -R, +R, -RW, +RW, and even -RAM. Pretty much everyone will go on record saying that the whole thing is a ridiculous mess, fueled by greed over license revenues. And they’re all right. The interesting thing however, is that in this format war, everybody wins.

See, when a format war breaks out, it creates a lot of attention and competition. This is good. Then vendors create drives that handle one set of formats, then combo drives that handle all formats for a slightly higher price—and consumers walk away with more choices and perhaps some semblance of a sense of security. What’s bad about that?

The only thing that sucks is that you need to do more research to figure out what to buy. Well, I got that covered.

Pick One
There’s two sets of formats you need to concern yourself with, the – and the +. Forget the RAM, that’s computeronly and essentially comparable to either rewritable format. So, in each -/+ group, there’s an R (recordable) and an RW (rewritable). Do you need a drive that reads both? NO! Pick one or the other, based on your situation.

When you buy a DVD recording drive, buy a few discs to test out on your DVD player and your PC’s DVD-ROM drive. Whatever works is what you need. Any new DVD player is going to play the -/+R discs fine. DVD-R is the most compatible format, with +R a close second.

The RW’s are a different story. Mostly, these will be used as backups, which means they’re usually read on the same drive you burned them on. So, there’s no compatibility issues at all.

My advice? Buy a good quality DVD-R/RW drive (the faster, the better) and some good quality media. Buy the max-speed media your drive can support, for example, 4x, because DVDs take a long time to burn. Super deals on blank discs are usually too good to be true—either the discs suck or they’re 1x speeds. Keep in mind, there’s pirated discs out there labeled faster than they actually are. Burning coasters is so ‘90s.

The multiformat drives? Forget ‘em. If there’s ever any question, a DVD-R will do the job, just like a CD-R.