Hi I am new, please help!
Bought one of these about 3 weeks ago, my first venture into DVD recording. Being lazy, and using Sky+ way too much, I had not used it to record until tonight. I have 2 sets (Phillips and Rigadata) of blank discs, DVD+RW, and the player quite simply will not recognise them as recordable, has anyone else had any issues with this?
You may wish to read the manual. The recorder does not support +RW.
Oh right, so just me being thick about these things then!?
As a matter of interest, which type of recordable discs are you attempting to record on. I had a quick check at the specifications for your model and the drive you have will not record on to DVD+RW recordable discs (as rdgrimes mentioned).
The discs that your DVD recorder will accept for recording include the following: DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD-RW and DVD-RAM 
Going by the manual, there is nothing special to preparing discs before use with the exception that the disc must be blank to start with, so you should be able to just pop in the disc, give it a moment to initialise and then start recording. If the recorder still acts up even with new compatible discs, then I would recommend bringing it back for repair / replacement.
Thanks alot… but…
Ok, could you please explain the difference between a DVD-RW and a DVD+RW?
DVD-RW and DVD+RW are both rewritable DVDs, which when recorded are suppose to be compatible with existing DVD players and DVD-ROM drives depending on the content written to them. DVD-RAM is another rewritable DVD format, however as it is incompatible with the existing DVD specification, this means that only DVD-RAM compatible players can playback this disc type.
However, when it comes to DVD recorders and PC DVD-writers, each format uses a different method of writing, which means that the disc type must be compatible with what the recorder / writer is capable of writing to. All recent PC DVD writers that I’m aware of will write to all DVD formats apart from some that don’t support DVD-RAM. However, a lot of standalone DVD recorders still only support one disc type or a combination of them, like your DVD recorder. Each disc format also offers its advantages, drawbacks and features over another when it comes to writing. Page 4 of your user manual lists the main features of each disc format as well as what features can and cannot be performed with each disc format.
The following (fairly old) article covers some in-depth technical caparison between DVD+RW and DVD-RW (mainly why DVD+R/RW is suppose to be supperior to DVD-R/RW):