About
Recording DVDs
Commercial DVDs you purchase or hire usually to play on all DVD players.
These DVDs are made by first producing a glass master disc, used in a machine that stamps an impression on to the blank DVD disc, the process of producing a master is expensive and is usually only viable for production runs of a 1000 or more.
For small quantities the answer is to use "Writable DVD disc " the video is written or burnt on to the disc using a laser beam. Currently there are 2 main formats of Writable DVD discs
DVD-R (produced by Panasonic) DVD+R (produced by Philips)
In terms of quality both these formats can store good a quality video
The first DVD players were made before the DVD-R and DVD+R formats were released and will not play either. Then manufactures tended to opt for either the DVD+R or DVD-R format and more recently over the last 3 years DVD players have been manufactured that play all formats. It is estimated that over 80% of DVD players in use today will play either DVD-R or DVD+R or both types.
All DVD disc will play on computers fitted with DVD drives and operating the appropriate software.
Unfortunately the story doesn't end there !
The DVD disc its proper name being "Digital Versatile Disc" is basically a digital storage disc approximately 6 times the capacity of a CD disc. Even with this capacity to store one hour or more of video you have to compress the video to make the digital file size small enough to fit on to the DVD disc. Its the way that the video is compressed that affects the quality and compatibility of the DVD.
Simply and with out going into to much detail, there are to main forms of compression constant bit rate CBR and variable bit rate VBR. Generally DVD recorders and cheaper domestic computer software based compression uses CBR this gives an overall lower quality results and suffers from compatibility issues.
All the DVDs produced by DVedit (except our Quick transfer service) use a professional ,2 pass, high quality VBR encoder and all our DVDs are made from manufacturer branded blank disc (we use either 'Verbatim' or 'Ritek' Disc) and recorded on one off our bank of 'Pioneer' Industry standard DVD Writers.