| Making DVDs and video CDs (VCD) can be a very frustrating process, resulting in lots of $2.00 coasters. DVD's fail to work for two primary reasons: the disc and the player.
The industry standard disc is the DVD-R, which will play in most DVD players manufactured in the past couple of years. There are several other types of disc on the market: DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-ROM, etc. These formats often cause both the audio and video to skip, or not to play at all. You may be o.k. using these formats, but be warned. Moreover, the older your player, the less likely that it will play any DVD other than those made in Hollywood. "Old" here means manufactured more than 18 to 24 months ago. If you plan on burning lots of DVDs at home, it's a good idea to take one of your DVDs with you to your favorite appliance store and verify that your DVD will play in the device you're planning on buying. And a word of warning: the more obscure the brand, the more apt you are to have compatibility problems. |
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There are numerous other reasons a DVD may not play as well. Unfortunately, creating DVDs is more an art than a science, especially if the source is VHS, S-VHS, 8mm and Hi8 tapes. It takes patience, study and lots of trial and error to get just the right magic working for you. We burned and discarded more than three dozen failed discs -- beverage coasters now -- before we got most of the kinks worked out.
If you still think this is something you want to try at home, here are some suggestions that may help.
The Meritline house brand is less expensive than the others, but of excellent quality. We've experienced very few failures with these discs.
Using Variable Bit Rate capture and burn, we routinely burn 6.0 to 6.5 mb onto a 4.7 mb disc. VBR provides an optimum compression-to-quality ratio.
Last updated: 2/20/08