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I just bought a new computer, here is a link to the DVD burner: Samsung SH-S223L/BEBS 22X SATA Black DVD Writer Lightscribe OEM

This is my first DVD burner, I've always just burned CD's which only have one type. I believe the only two types are DVD+R and DVD-R (excluding rewriteables which I think fall into the plus or minus camps as well) -- which one will my burner require? Also how do you tell, want to teach myself to fish on this type of issue.

5 Answers 5

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Step 1: Don't use a retailer product description, use Google to find your model.

Step 2: Visit the manufacturer's site.

They drive supports a lot of formats.

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According to the specifications on that page, it supports -R, +R, -RW, +RW, -R DL, +R DL, and -RAM.

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which modern drives it dosen't matter - almost all drives accept dvd+ dvd- and dvd ram these days. However DVD+ seems more common, and is definately compatable with all DVD drives so, it would probably be what i'd get if i wanted to play it safe.

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you can purchase common dvd+r, dvd-r for your burner. dvd-r is relatively cheap sometimes. your burner has the light-scribe capability so you can buy lite-scribe DVDs as well. light-scribe DVDs has a special coating on them so you can burn the label(black&white) on them with your DVD writer.

you can get dual layer DVDs which has double capacity, but they are expensive.

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The above answers are all correct - almost any type of writable DVD will work with almost any new drive. Depending on what you want to do, though, there may be other considerations - for example, if you want to be sure your DVDs will play in old DVD players, it might be necessary to get DVD+R/RW media so you can set the book type to DVD-ROM. As far as I know, '-' media doesn't have that capability.

You can also get dual-layer DVDs that hold 8.5 GB as opposed to the 4.7 GB of a single-layer DVD, but they generally cost quite a bit more than single-layer DVDs.

In addition to that, media from some manufacturers are more reliable than others. I've never had issues with Taiyo Yuden and Verbatim media, whereas cheap store brands are less likely to be error-free and readable across many different drives.

I've never tried Lightscribe media myself, so I can't really comment on that, but they tend to be more expensive than regular blank DVDs as well.

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