Review of the burn of two DVD disks.

(Reviewing the latest Iona Test burn on my laptop)


I went by my friends house to check out the DVDs on his system. I had two DVDs. We put in a PLUS R Kye Kye disk first and pressed play. It looked nice. My friend has a Sony Blue Ray player, a nice large wide screen tv and a surround system. The video display said, 1080p and 48k stereo. The video looked really nice. Audio was not bad but I wish I had a better mix. With the surround system the sound seemed a lot better, than with the TV speakers, but it was a little harse on the high end of the audio spectrum.

My friend, John asked me why I used DVD +R's instead of minus R disks. No special reason, I think an older burner I used only burned plus R disks so I was in a habit of buying those. He said, minus R disks play on more players. Yes I know that.

We put the test burn I made of Iona in his player next, I wanted to see what it looked like because the Kye Kye DVD looked really good. It's possible the "line doubler" or upscaling of the Blue Ray player made the video look a lot better (1080P).

For the Iona DVD, the Sony Blue Ray player threw out an error message. It couldn't read the plus RW disk in there. This is one of my older blanks, I used for a quick test burn. It played in my Macintosh and PC but not some of the Sony players. That's okay. I'll go home and burn another one so we can screen it on John's surround system. I mentioned to John, that I just bought some minus r disks at Best Buy. Soon I left to run some errands, and decided to stop by Starbucks and burn another DVD on the laptop. So I grab the new package of "DVD-R" disks I thought I purchased and opened them up. Turns out I picked up the wrong type of blanks. After opening them, I realize I picked up PLUS R disks again.

Well perhaps the Plus R will work on his player. Plus RW disks can be more troublesome than "write once" PLUS R DVDs. So I need to go pick up some minus r blanks. I might as well do that. If the plus r disks are rejected by the Sony players, I can use them for archiving of some data or some other movies that work on some of the other players around the house. I've put laserdisc movies we own on DVD plus r and they work in some of the Sony players that are used by my mother. They work to media shift her classic laser disk movie collection, so they won't go to waste. They are okay for archiving. And of course any DVD will likely work in the Macintosh for Handbrake rips for a home Kiosk system (WD Player).

Time to get some new glasses, or be a little more careful while I'm shopping. Looking for my Starbucks card I found a best buy gift card in the wallet that I forgot I had. (An old Christmas present.) So I can run back to best buy and get some minus r blanks.

Another thing the plus r disks can be used for is data loads. As they will likely be readable by a pc.

Well I'm writing while tired. During my little afternoon siesta/nap I was called on the phone five times by friends and relatives. My friend John is on a city council. He told me he was "very tired and in need of a nap". He was in four hours of meetings today. He has a business, and has work to do. But this small city barely pays council men and women. So he's having a long day as well, and he is going off to another meeting, and will likely be working late into the night for his business projects.

-- Iona disk sent was a Plus R burn.

The Iona disk played in most of my players at home, but might not work in all the players It was a DVD plus R disk.

Perhaps the PLUS R DVD I sent to Iona will actually work in the players they put the disk in. I'll probably want to send another minus R disk to be sure they don't have any problems watching the video.

These DVDs are created on my Macintosh, as Video_TS exports. Copied to a directory, they can be copied from plus r or minus r blanks with a pc or Macintosh. The user just has to cooy the files to a directory, then burn the new disk with the video_TS and Audio_TS folders at the root level of the new DVD.

That DVD should work if that type DVD is recognized by the video player. Back in the early day of DVD, there were two standards, PLUS R was used by some manufacturers and Minus R by others. PLUS R was used by Apple and computer manufacturers and Minus R was used by most of the video companies, like Sony. Eventually most modern players could handle both types of DVD's but Minus R's still are more universal.

The video_TS folder will have the same content. On an unprotected DVD the "video_TS" folder is all that is needed in the root of any ripped copy to create a playable copy. I'm talking about basic DVD's ripped by a home user. I'm talking about basic DVD video programs, not extra multimedia files that may exist on mixed media releases.