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I don't know about the smarts, but I'll see if I can help. Most name brands made in Japan are a decent bet. Download and use the free DVD Identifier to know what company manufactured your media. For example, I use 8X +R Sony. It is manufactured by either Taiyo Yuden or Sony. The TY is MIJ and the Sony is made in Taiwan. I like both and the forums rate both high. You can get TY under the TY name as well. Verbatims are usually a good bet. The MIJ are usually MMC or TY, both good. That gives you quite a few choices. Memorex isn't usually a first choice, but not all of it is the CMC that gave the company a bad name. DVD Identifier would let you and us know what you have. For video most people burn at 4X to 6X. With good equipment I don't see 8X as a problem. If a system can use 16X, I still don't see going that fast. The possibility of write errors increases with speed. What you need sort of depends on the burner, if 8X on DVDs, you don't need the 16X unless they're just readily available. Also a lot of times a drive's firmware has to be updated when using media faster than it was originally manufactured to use. An 8X burner won't burn 16X speed, but it should work up to 8X using the 16X media. Similar to the siutation with the older 2.4X and 4X burners. You'd be hard pressed to find the slower media nowadays. Luckily the newer media is backwards compatible with the older, slower drives and the slower media should work in the faster drives, such as 8X media in the newer 16X drives. That way the manufacturers and vendors don't have to make a lot of different speed disks and different speed media works in different speed drives. Makes the whole situation more simple. Some drives would only use +R or -R format, but nowadays most drives support multiple formats. Just pay attention to what your drive supports.
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 16. April 2006 @ 12:32
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