DVD Burning Notes

Some notes on DVD burning and backing up using Windows. Linux has DVD writing, but no flexible tool like DVDShrink for easy reauthoring and resizing. Please go to DVDAuthor page for information on Linux DVD authoring resources.

0. DVD + or - R

DVD+R ( Sony and others ) and DVD-R ( Pioneer and others ) blank discs are now available at the same price, so only thing to check is which format is supported by your DVD player. If your player supports both, like in my case then you are in a dilemma on which one to choose.

lorddmurf.com has more details. If your player supports both he recommends DVD-R which has more player compatibility. While cdfreaks.com finds +R to be technically better than -R.

1. Choosing the DVD-/+R Media

lorddmurf.com recommends these brands and rates these websites to buy them.

Normally good and reliable:

MXL = Maxell
MCC = Mitsubishi Chemicals
TDK = TDK Corp
PVC = Pioneer
RITEKGx = Ritek
OPTODISC = Optodisc 
RICOHJPN = Ritek or Ricoh
TAIYOYUDEN or YUDEN = Taiyo Yuden

Normally bad or questionable:

LEADDATA or LD01 or LD or LEDA = Lead Data
PRINCO = Princo
PIO or PIODATA = Fake Pioneer
CMC = CMC Magnetics
ACCU = Unknown OEM
LONGTEN = Unknown OEM
MATRIX = Unknown OEM
PRODISC = Unknown OEM
AN31 = Unknown OEM
SONY = Fake Sony

I used DVD Identifier and found that the Fuji and TDK discs were made by RICOHJPN while a store branded cheap disk from CompUSA was a PRINCO. All these discs worked fine for me.

Recommended sites for buying media

Meritline.com
RIMA.com
AllMediaOutlet.com

2. DVD disc capacity

The DVD movie discs has size of 8 Gigs while the DVD-R and DVD+R blank DVD's holds only 4 Gig. So if you want to backup a movie DVD you may have to remove extras and/or extra audio tracks and/or resize and/or compress the video to fit into 4 Gigs . If you dont want to compress and loss video quality you can back up the movie into two DVD+/-R discs usinh DVDShrink or with DVDFab to keep all menus intact.

3. Tools

DVDShrink - Decrypt and copy the DVD contents to Hard Disk. Re-author and/or compress the DVD to fit into 4Gig CD+/-R
DVDFab - Split into 2 discs with all menus and extras intact
DVDDecrypter - Decrypt and copy the DVD contents to Hard Disk
Nero - Burning DVD/CD
DVD Identifier - DVD media information.

4. Scratched DVD's

If you are ripping/backing up a badly scratched DVD, if DVDShrink fails to read, try DVDDecrypter with options ( Tools->Settings ) set to ignore errors.

Also if you have multiple DVD drives, try a different drive to read the scratched DVD, some of the drives like the SONY DVD writers are more sensitive to scracthes.

5. Guides

dvdrhelp.com
doom9.org