Mark -

You're probably not too likely to find a burner still in the retail market chain that won't burn both DVD-R and DVD+R, so you can burn either kind of blanks in almost any recent burner. There may be some tradeoffs relative to which is most readable in other kinds of devices, but I haven't found much info on that. If you're burning a videocam bit to play back on a "consumer" (non-PC) machine, feedback on which you decide to use and how it plays would be helpful - more for others than for my personal use, since I don't normally do video.

The current "sales feature" in DVD burners now seems to be whether they can burn 2-layer blanks, and I've yet to see a source for the blanks locally. The packaging on the Mad Dog burner I bought has a "*" on the media spec, with the footnote:

"* At the time of production, neither DVD-R DL Media nor DVD±RW DL Media have been released."

The burner claims:

"16x DVD±R Writer: Supports all popular formats including DVD-Video, DVD-Data, DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-R and DVD-RW.
"8x DVD±RW Rewriter and makes reference to double layer RW media.
"48x CD-R Writer
"24x CD-RW Rewriter
"16x DVD-ROM: Supports DVD-R disks, Video disks, and Photo CDs
"48x CD-ROM: Supports all popular CD formats including CD-text, Audio CDs, Data CDs/CD-R and CD-RW media"

I've tried counting how many distinct media specifications are referenced, but I keep getting lost. Since there is no mention of "Authoring" DVDs, it's probably safe to assume the burner doesn't handle them - based on one of the white papers linked above; but the number of different specifications available leads me to a "stick it in and see if it works" philosophy.

(One thing I did learn from the white papers was that those surplus blanks from the med office are probably formatted as "Authoring" DVDs, and won't work in most "citizen class" burners, so it's not worth stealing them. Shucky-darn and &#!@#! - I'll have to run that past the bootlegger who offered me some a while back.)

My concern was getting good CD burn capability, and that's apparently so "old fashined" that most of them don't even mention the spec varieties there on the packaging. I've burned about a dozen CDs with the new Mad Dog burner, and see a "real" 31x or so in my machine - which is a vast improvement over the 2x max for my old burner, even ignoring that the old one made coasters out of nearly 50% of the disks.

I'm still sort of "groping" for a name-recognition category for Mad Dog. I've bought a couple of their products, mostly based on price/performance comparisions. CompUSA seems to push them, but I can't figure out whether the great discounts and rebates are an attempt to "buy in" on the market, or whether they're trying to sell them off to get rid of them. Absolutely NO COMPLAINTS at this point on the items I've bought. All that I've seen indicates that they're "comers" who are trying hard, and doing an ok job.

(My "name recognition" concern may be because "Mad Dog" reminds me of "Big Dog," a local company that does a 10% improvement on Harleys and then sells them for 6 or 8 times the price, with the claim that they're "better." They are better, but they're still Harleys. (Motorcycles, if you're not into the lingo.))

Note: I used the html character code ± for the "+/-" character in a couple of places. A few people may read in a font that doesn't include the character(?).

John