DVD Burners

[Howard]

I'm planning on entering the world of DVD burners sometime soon by buying an NEC ND2500 8X burner from Ebuyer.

Is there anything I should know about all this DVD burning lark? Any media I should stay away from? Favoured burning software (Seeing as this drive is OEM)?

Also how long should I wait before painting it silver to match the rest of my case (White is gonna look so crappy )? Sod's law says if I spray it silver it'll die the next week and I'll have to RMA it!

Thanks

[Agent]

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/produ...duct_uid=59300

Looks nice, offers 8X on + and - media. Good price to.
Im close to buying it, but telling myself to hold off for dual layer DVD writers, as im not really in a desperate need for one.

[Howard]

The day I buy another Sony optical drive is the day Bugs Bunny becomes Prime Minister

And it's more expensive than the well-regarded NEC.

Yeah I can't help thinking I should wait. But then again you could say that forever and never be content. I bit the bullet with my graphics card anyway. And I need something to read DVDs as many new games will be released on it, so I might as well get a burner that does both!!

[Aaron]

I use Nero for pretty much everything CD/DVD burning related. I think blankdiscshop.co.uk sell it cheap, though it might be an older version.

As for media, I've heard some budget DVD media (~£10 for 25 4x DVD-Rs) can be a bit hit and miss. Whether a disc will burn or not is largely dependent on the DVD burner. Some DVD burners (i.e. Sony) are very fussy about blank discs and some (i.e. Pioneer, LiteOn, Plextor) will burn anything you throw at them.

And yeah, I should have waited for dual-layer burners too. However, I wanted one now and I'm sure dual-layer ones won't cost more than £100 when they're released so I haven't lost that much on my purchase (which can always go in another one of my machines).

[Lexeus]

I have a Plextor-708A and I think it is great !
It will read and write ANYTHING. As for media, well as I say it will write anything, I am currently using Bulpaq orange top DVD-R 4x media, great value. Only had a problem with one disc so far and it was just some blocks of data, so I am pretty sure it was dirt on the surface of the disk as I had noticed it before I put it in to burn, probably because I had transfered them from another spindle.
Anyway, my advice would probably be to do what you are doing and buy one like the NEC which will 8x burn but is at the cheaper end. I would make sure you do some research into it first though, google for media problems and other such things. As although the plextor I have is pricey (second hand at £110inc for me ) I have had very little haslte from it. Well apart from the one I bought suddenly stopping reading cd's which meant I had to RMA it and be sent a BRAND NEW unopened one . Though, thanks to plextor's brilliant rma service, I had a replacement within the week at no cost to me at all, well apart from the phone call to the courier .