DVD Burning Tips: How to Avoid the Top Five Disc-Burning Mistakes

CD/DVD recorders and media are pretty mature and stable products at this point. But if you aren't careful, a bad burn could still happen--and leave you with only a bicycle reflector for your effort. Here are the five most common disc-burning errors, and how to avoid them.

1. You didn't verify: If there's a golden rule for burning discs, it's "Thou shalt verify." Using your burning software's verify (or validate) function to compare what has been written with what was read is your best hedge against nasty surprises down the road (see FIGURE 1). The verify function won't increase your chances of burning a disc successfully, but it will let you know of a problem in time to burn another disc. Many a seemingly successful burn will bug out when you play it--not because the disc has gone bad, but because the burn was bad to begin with.

2. It's the wrong media: In a perfect world, choosing the right media wouldn't be an issue. But nothing is more frustrating or embarrassing than sitting down in front of Grandma's TV at the family reunion only to watch her DVD player choke miserably on the photo album you labored over so dutifully. The moral of the story? Select media that you know your player (or Grandma's) will support. In the case of DVDs, that means choosing from DVD±/RW or DVD-RAM.

If you buy bare, no-name blank media (CD or DVD), follow the golden rule above (verify!)--and prepare to run into the occasional bad disc. In my experience, DVD media tends to be a lot more reliable than CD media; but generally speaking, the lower a disc's cost, the better its chances of heading straight to the scrap heap.

3. You're going too fast: Nobody likes waiting around for a disc to burn. Unfortunately, going as fast as you can isn't always the best strategy. While I've rarely had problems burning rewritable CDs and DVDs, their recordable counterparts are a different story. Some CD-R and DVD-R discs burn at top speed correctly, but I've experienced blowouts with many others. Once you factor in the time you spend trying to determine what the problem is, you might be better off stepping your burn speed down a notch (see FIGURE 2). And unless you're using a stopwatch, you'll never notice the difference between, say, 18X and 16X anyway.