Quote - Never did figure out the difference between +/- R DVDs, people always just sais to use

From what I read, these days there's not much practical difference.  All modern hardware handles either just fine AFAIK.

Quote - and even though the burner runs at 18x speed, i would suggest (assuming you find the option) to burn is at lower, say 4x speed, no need to push the limits when you don't know that everything works perfectly below the limits.

Again based on what I read, that's bad advice.  It's counterintuitive, but from what I understand discs rated at higher speeds are best burned at their top speed, and burning at slower speeds actually causes more problems.

Everywhere I have read, says that burning slower can avoid problems, and burning over the rated speed (ie burning a 4x at 16x) makes the problems. Atleast on older drives this was true, due to the material used in the disks, since the laser has to "burn" the information on. Running at too fast of speed, would leave the laser too short of time to "burn" the mark on the dvd/cd. Running at lower speeds, can have the laser either run at less power, or so i'm told, never had the will to take a screwdriver and see what makes them tick :)

But I never have a problem, and have burned almost 200 DVDs in the past 6 months, not one coaster, drive is 16x and I usually burn at 8x or 4x, so without seeing his computer first hand, all i can say is what is different from what I do.

I've had one or two faulty burns using Nero, and finally worked out why. I am normally doing several thing at the same time for example listening to music,redubbing a video,browsing web sites,while burning a DVD. 
That is when I get failures. The compuyer is reading and writing to the hard disks for several programs at the same time and some data corruption occurs.
When I burn with only Nero running there is no problem.

  One other thing... on any CD or DVD burn, at least as far as I have ever heard of, the app creates an "image" of what's being burned to disc... it creates a file of the file(s) that are going to be burned to disc in the format that it will be, on the disc, then uses that to do the actual burn. HDD space can become critical, and even cause an incomplete, or damaged burn... sometimes, you'll get erratic error messages, as well. Lou.

Quote - Everywhere I have read, says that burning slower can avoid problems, and burning over the rated speed (ie burning a 4x at 16x) makes the problems.

I don't recommend burning over the rated speed either.  In fact, I didn't think one could burn at a higher speed than the disc's rating (maybe one could set the burning app to a higher speed, but that doesn't mean it's actually exceeding the disc's rated max).

Quote - One other thing... on any CD or DVD burn, at least as far as I have ever heard of, the app creates an "image" of what's being burned to disc... it creates a file of the file(s) that are going to be burned to disc in the format that it will be, on the disc, then uses that to do the actual burn.

That may very well be true - it sounds likely.  However, in my experience with these suites (admittedly years ago, since I stopped using them), if the process is interrupted and the app crashes, there is no image file to point the app to - that is, the whole process must be started again.  This implies that even if the app is burning an image, the whole process is one big stream and one problem anywhere can bring the whole process crashing down.  I prefer to control each step myself, with non-bloatware (create the iso - did it work? good.  Now I can deal with burning the image do disc, rather than wondering where the problem occurred).

Then there's the (IME) wholly problematic method of burning (name escapes me) where the app treats the burn like a regular Windows file system - you can add files at will and the app burns them one at a time.  Never had anything but trouble with that shyte.

Quote - I've had one or two faulty burns using Nero, and finally worked out why. I am normally doing several thing at the same time for example listening to music,redubbing a video,browsing web sites,while burning a DVD. 
That is when I get failures. The compuyer is reading and writing to the hard disks for several programs at the same time and some data corruption occurs.
When I burn with only Nero running there is no problem.

I have been doing other stuff while the disk was burning.  I don't have quite enough coasters yet, so I'll give it a try and see if that makes a difference.

I'll also try reducing the speed to less than 18X to see if that works.I think I can pick 12X as the next lowest speed.

I'd pick 4x and work up from that if it's OK - a DVD burning at 4x is still fairly quick, or it seemed so to me after using CDs (also typically at 4x).

Well, I just gave up on Nero!!!

I have been trying to burn DVDs all day long!  Out of 9 burning attempts (50 minutes each), I ended up with 2 readable DVDs!!!  All of the rest say that the burn was successfull, but when I look at the DVD contents, there isn't any!!!  Yet when I try to reburn files to it I get a message telling me the DVD is not empty! I tried "multisession", "no multisession", 16x and 12x and even burning only a gig on a 4 gig DVD and nada!!!  All except 2 look like they are empty in "My Computer."  What a waste of time!

I downloaded the trial of "Ashampoo Burning Studio" and have managed to burn 1 successful DVD and another is in the process of being burned.

So Nero is history. What a tempermental software that is.  Maybe their "Pro" version is better than the one that came with my computer, but I'm not going to spend money to find out,  LOL

At least I know the problem is not my Verbatim DVD+R disks.

Acadia, sorry to hear about your problems.

I use Nero exclusively for all my DVD/CD burning and I have had very very few problems with it since version 5 and I am on 7 now. I am an IT tech support person though so when I do have problems I'm lucky enough to be able to solve them myself. :)

Just one thing that I haven't seen mentioned here is that different brands of CD's and DVD's work better with with some brands of writers than others. Over the years I have had to give away quite a few blanks because my writers didn't like them. Verbatim is my brand of choice and has been for a long time though as they are much better than most.

The trick of lowering the write speed is really good advice. Often disks that fail badly after a high-speed write will do just fine at lower speeds. I bought a spindle of 100 I-Mation disks and created about 5 or 6 coffee cup holders before I lowered the speed, and then I wrote about 90 disks on the trot without any failures.

IMHO verifying the contents of each disk I write is critical! I know that the error correction system in burners and readers will compensate for some bad information read off the disk but I prefer to know that the disk contents are 100% when I am storing critical stuff. I also very seldom have disks fail verification after being written. This is obviously after I have verified that the blanks work well with my writers though.

It's also important to understand that there is a lot of technical stuff going on in the background when you write disks, and there is a list as long as my arm of things that can cause bad writes, sometimes only in one brand of software while others work fine.

I hope this info helps and good luck with your problems! :)

I never have that problem with Nero 6...I use DVD+R for most of my burning needs, Use SmartStart, Choose DVD,  turn off 'verify',  lower my burn speed down to 4x, {if you dont lower the speed, data can very easily get skipped resulting in corrupt files} and it does just fine.

When I create backup DVDs I don't use the zip or exe files. I extract or install the item to an aptly named folder and save those folders to DVD. Inside each folder is the Runtime, Readme and the promo images for that item. Reinstalling to Poser is then simply a matter of opening a folder and dragging the runtime over to my poser external runtime of choice. I have found this to be a fast method.Having the promo images with winxp set to show thumbnails makes it easy to identify what you are looking for.

That's a good way of doing it grahamjames, but bear in mind that when you copy the files back to your hard drive like that they will most likely be tagged as read only. If anything wants to modify a file you may get some really funky and interesting results.

It probably won't happen very often at all but it's worth mentioning.

Quote - Well, I just gave up on Nero!!!

I have been trying to burn DVDs all day long!  Out of 9 burning attempts (50 minutes each), I ended up with 2 readable DVDs!!!  All of the rest say that the burn was successfull, but when I look at the DVD contents, there isn't any!!!  Yet when I try to reburn files to it I get a message telling me the DVD is not empty! I tried "multisession", "no multisession", 16x and 12x and even burning only a gig on a 4 gig DVD and nada!!!  All except 2 look like they are empty in "My Computer."  What a waste of time!

I've been using nero for at least 8 years, never had problems with it. That is probably because I download newest nero version when I buy new burner.

Manufacturers give out their bundled software with their hardware, you got nero. But who knows how old is that nero compared to your burner. Maybe they just took what they had from previous orders. If that's the case, problem is that your burner isn't fully supported by that version of nero. You said you got a new computer, that should mean that your burner is also new, you got nero 6.6.0.19 and current nero version is 7.9.6.0. See my point?

Ashampoo you downloaded is new version so it should support it. Try updating your nero 6.6.0.19 to latest v6, 6.6.1.15a, (update package 1, www.nero.com/nero6/eng/nero-up.php
 ). Or download nero 7 trial, maybe nero 6 serial works with it, I know it did in some version jumps (my nero 5 serial worked for nero 6).

Another thing is, which discs you have exactly. It's far from true that all are alike. I had some that are, sorry for expression, just plain crap. Even what's printed on them isn't important, important is who is manufacturer of writing layer. With nero you should have Nero Info Tool (don't worry, it doesn't burn them :), it just reads some info from the drive and discs, if inserted), insert one of your burned or empty DVDs and start it. Choose your burner and tab Disc, it should say there who the manufacturer is. It will probably be some type of code and numbers. Now you can check what people say about that type of layers, either google it or search on this forum club.cdfreaks.com/

Acadia, I have had a lot of problems using nero as well, I got ashampoo burning studio free with a magazine and it works very well, it can write most types of disks, even film dvds.

Quote -
IMHO verifying the contents of each disk I write is critical! I know that the error correction system in burners and readers will compensate for some bad information read off the disk but I prefer to know that the disk contents are 100% when I am storing critical stuff. I also very seldom have disks fail verification after being written. This is obviously after I have verified that the blanks work well with my writers though.

I'm not using the "verify" after burning.  When I did that with Nero I was getting errors.

So after I burn I copy the contents from the disk back to my hard drive. I'm hoping that no errors while copying from the disk to the hard drive means that the actual files themselves are fine. Before I got my new computer with the CD burner, my problems with bad CD saves gave errors of not being able to read the data on the disk: that happened when trying to copy the contents or directly accessing it from the CD.

So far I now have 4 DVDS that I can copy to my hard drive without any errors.

I use DVD+RW and DVD-R, and have no problems at all with Nero. My Burners are by NEC.

Quote - So after I burn I copy the contents from the disk back to my hard drive. I'm hoping that no errors while copying from the disk to the hard drive means that the actual files themselves are fine.

That is also a good way of verifying that the CD contents are ok. I use it sometimes when I forget to check 'Verify CD contents'. The only thing is of course that it takes a while to do it this way. :)

Acadia, you might try http://club.cdfreaks.com/

That's the best forum I've found for this stuff.  There are lots of ways to check your data.  One is as you said, to copy the data back to your HDD.  Another is synchronization software (try download.com for some freeware).  Another is to check the quality of the disc itself (good disc means good data, generally), with a tool like DVDinfo pro.

Really, I think you've just been burned by crap software, and are overcompensating.  Once you get a good workflow going, with some non-crap software, you'll relax about the process and stop worrying so much.

Folks defending Nero shouldn't bother.  Okay, it works for YOU.  It's still a pile of crap.

Quote - Folks defending Nero shouldn't bother.  Okay, it works for YOU.  It's still a pile of crap.

 
Well I guess we all know which corner you are in! :)

Nero works perfectly well for me and many many others. Don't dismiss it too offhandedly because the bad experiences people have had with it can almost always be attributed to software/driver/hardware incompatibilities.

Quote - I use DVD+R for most of my burning needs

I bought some Maxwell DVD+R  disks yesterday and have managed to burn 3 for 3 !  So it seems that the problem was the Verbatim DVD-R disks for some reason.  Not sure why I couldn't burn with the DVD-R ones. What a waste of money! I have a spindle of  about 70 DVD-R  disks left that I can't use.

It sounds you have a +R dvd recorder, some of them can only burn one kind of disk.

Make sure when you write a disk that the speed you use in nero is the same as the speed of the disk, so if you have a 16x speed disk, don`t make the write speed higher than 16x or it is likely to cause errors (you can safely write at a slower speed than the disk write speed if you want to for some reason).

Quote - It sounds you have a +R dvd recorder, some of them can only burn one kind of disk.

Make sure when you write a disk that the speed you use in nero is the same as the speed of the disk, so if you have a 16x speed disk, don`t make the write speed higher than 16x or it is likely to cause errors (you can safely write at a slower speed than the disk write speed if you want to for some reason).

I was told that my burner was +/- and could handle all disks including the double layer DVDs. 

I did manage to burn a few of the DVD-R disks but I think for every one I managed to successfully burn, there were 5 failures or more.

The DVD+R disks that I have are 16x and are burning automatically at that speed.

It depends on the make of the burner, as to which brands of discs it can handle for writing. Strange but true.

Quote - It depends on the make of the burner, as to which brands of discs it can handle for writing. Strange but true.

That is weird. Well, so long as I know that I have more success with DVD+R I'm ok with that.  I'll see if my nephew wants the other ones.

Quote - It depends on the make of the burner, as to which brands of discs it can handle for writing. Strange but true.

That is true, I have had 5 or 6 dvd drives and they all have had problems burning certain brands of disks.

Sometimes it varies by model within the same brand of burners, even for all in one burners. Not so much of a problem with CD R discs, or even CD RWs. Most of this seems to be with DVD R and RW.

Ugh! I notice that my dystexia caused me to give some bad info yesterday.  The disks I bought are actually  Maxell DVD-R disks. The disks I had and couldn't burn with much success were Verbatim DVD+R disks. I haven't had a single failure with the new Maxell DVD-R disks.

I use DVD+RW and -R. Ridata for the former, and Khypermedia for the latter (for the moment).  I have been using 4X for both.