On Dec 31, 2003, at 4:25 AM, John Callan wrote:
But now I begining to wonder whether I
should buy an external dvd writer for my mac to enable me to burn DVD+R
rather then DVD-R as it seems to me that +R is the most popular format .
Its always good to have more options, but I don't know that switching to +R will give you fewer problems. In systems that can read only one type (increasingly rare) +R support is more common on Windows and -R is more common on Macs. It's a crap shoot making DVDs for home players no matter which you use. Its not unlike the early days of CDR where not every player could read them. I have a friend who is heavily involved in DVD production... and he works on Macs in an otherwise very large Windows based company. He says he has far fewer problems with -R disks being readable than +R in a wide variety of situations.
That pretty much mirrors my experience... though I have much less of it than my friend. I started writing DVDs via an external unit that would do either. I chose +R as that is what Retrospect recommended for best performance from this drive. Since I had a pile of those disks I also used them for creating data disks. Toast happily burned away creating and verifying +R disks. Only after burning multiple gigs of data to numerous disks did I realize that the same Mac that burned and verified those +R disks couldn't read them reliably. My Windows machines could. So could Virtual PC running on the Mac. This was on Jaguar. Panther fixed that and those +R disks can be read fine on any of my machines now. After that headache I switched to using all -R disks... also because -R is required for iDVD which only works on an Apple installed internal drive. On my local machines (Windows and Mac) I never had a bit of trouble reading those -R disks. On the few occasions where I've had trouble with disks I've passed on its always been with the +R variety.
Bob Smith
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