If it's a one-shot deal with a short time frame, you might be ahead to look for a friend who's already set up to burn?

If you're looking for a stand-alone DVD burner, the choices are a little limited in my retail market. PC internal or external burners are relatively easy to find, and most of the ones currently at retail outlets will burn DVD-R, DVD+R and DVD+/-R/W. "Standard grade" for internal PC burners runs about $80 (US) and "Plus grade" around $130. "Deluxe" models go on up to ridiculous.

Subject to argument, the DVD-R is closest to "commercial DVD." The DVD+R was developed because of supposed advantages for "consumer use." There are advocates for both.

The DVD burner I got with my latest PC gave me lots of problems, but I just slid a replacement in a few days ago and all seems well now. From CompUSA, a MadDog Multimedia DVD+/-R, R/W that came with bundled Nero, can also (they say, anyway) burn the new 2-layer DVDs.

Cash up front, $79 US, but there's a $30 rebate that I assume will work, so the drive cost me less ($50 US net) than a 10-pack of DVD blanks at many retail outlets here.

Noting that the burner that gave me problems was one of the very early models, I wouldn't have any real objection to looking at a later model from the same maker - which was Pioneer. The problem I had was insufficient buffer to handle the built in retry delay. Later models added more RAM, internal to the burner, and went up to about 8MB, before they figured out that a track re-start could give them "infinite retry delay" and most of the current ones are back to about 2MB.

Having done some recent research, I can offer "great gobs" of potential understanding - all, I think, from the Pioneer support site. In lieu of help of specific problems they offer the "baffle with bullshit" option, but there might be some help in these .pdf white papers. I found several of them rather interesting:

White Paper on Pioneer Dual Layer DVD

Microsoft Dual Layer R/W White Paper

DVD-R/W 4.7 GB White Paper

DVD R/W White Paper

DVD-R General Use vs Authoring Use White Paper

Pinnacle White Paper: MPEG-2

Not really what you need to know to sashay into your local bit-shop and grab something off the shelf, but maybe others will have an interest too.

John