In my opinion, DVD-R have never given me a problem, but if your player can handle both, it shouldnt be a problem which you use as long as they are good media like Verb, Sony, Maxell or TY.
They use the pressed in format. These discs have no actual burn. Thank goodness for that or we'd have 50 million posts of sony/columbia pictures using cmags on original movies and people can't play them, LOL
Plus or dash: There's not much difference to them.It's all about compatability and usually the stand alone players/game consoles/and other pc drive2 may be affected.Lots of lasers and they do vary considerably at reading backups.
A stand alone player may say plus/dash/ or both on the specs.It doen't mean it will play your plus/dash/or both.It may not even play either. These are normal playback issues and some stand alones can be real picky as to which format/how fast/the quality of media/and even differences between burners.The quality of burners is also a factor.Some brands prefer a certain format even if they can burn both formats. Other burners have the bitsetting capability to booktype the plus format into dvd-rom.This booktyping fakes some of those picky stand alones into thinking they are actual dvd-roms so you'll have better compatability.
I myself,booktype all my plus media to dvd-rom. I play them on many drives and those drives tell me which format they prefer.
Best advice to a newb: Get the quality media like taiyo yuden/verbatim/hitachi/ritek. Burn several backups of each format.Keep the burn speed at 4x.Test in all the stand alones and drives you plan on playing those backups in. Those players will tell you which format they like. If they don't like a certain format,then they'll show some sort of no disc/dirty disc/wrong format error.
Stick to the format that those players will read off your particular burner.
Ron: What's the brand name and model# of your dvd-rw drive? Maybe we can lead you in the right direction.Some brand name burners may prefer a certain format,and some also booktype.
The majority of people say that there is no difference between +,- dvd's,but from my own experience DVD-r's work a lot better for me. I have 3 dvd players and they have trouble with playback when I use DVD+R's. My ps2 also has trouble with the +r's.Although both my PCs read +and-r,s just fine.
