Burning CD’s and DVD’s can be a time consuming endeavor, rife with frustration and “coasters”. This lesson is geared toward helping you avoid the multitude of problems associated with creating music, video and data DVD’s and CD’s. My complaint with most burning software is that there is no clear way to select the RIGHT method to create the disc you want to make without having to dig for it (And many cheaper software apps don’t allow you to make all of these kinds of DVD’s!). Typically you will see a complex menu of options for creating DVD video discs (that will give you the fancy menus like you see when you rent a movie DVD), DVD audio disc, DVD data disc, DVD photo disc etc. When all you want is a data disc (folders with files in them), or to copy an existing DVD exactly.
For starters lets let it be known that Vista has some issues with consistently creating DVD’s error free. Vista can natively write to DVD’s without third party software. But there are documented problems. Windows XP needs third party software for DVD creation, CD’s it can handle natively.
Common problems deal with CD/DVD hardware and drivers
Older DVD or CD burners may not be fully compatible with newer software including Windows Vista (i.e you can view the contents, but maybe not burn a disc.) It’s a good idea to update the firmware of your CD/DVD burner if possible and keep drivers updated. Third party software like Nero and Roxio have had there share of problems but usually work better than ever, as long as the drivers, media and other requirements are met.
Disc media used to be a problem where using cheaply made discs would half the time end as “coasters” - useless unsuccessfully burned discs. Generally this isn’t as big a concern as it once was but you can still run into trouble buying bad discs. Unfortunately you can’t always physically SEE the discs are bad. Media types such as DVD-RAM, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW need to be considered when burning discs because many players can read one type and not another or record to one type and not another.
Formatting the disc can lead to trouble. There are various kinds of file formats available for burning discs; UDF, ISO being common types. UDF allows for newer more advanced file types (the ability to burn some files to a disc now and then some more later) and will only work reliably on newer operating systems, while ISO generally is readable on more players and operating systems.
Don’t overwork the PC when burning discs
A good rule of thumb is to try premium - name brand disc manufacturers and use different formats as mentioned previously (DVD-R, DVD+R) to see which works more reliably on your system. Also I make a rule to not do anything else with my computer while burning CD/DVD’s - turn off unnecessary programs running in the background. And burning at full speed is not recommended. If you have a 8X DVD burner and the media is 4X you will run into trouble burning at 8X speed. In this case I would try at 3X speed or slower. It often takes some experimenting to get this part right. It’s worth mentioning that copying files directly from a CD/DVD disc to a blank CD/DVD disc are not recommended. It’s usually better to copy from a hard drive to a CD/DVD. Having plenty of RAM memory always helps. Go get ‘em!