Have you guys had any luck reusing DVD RW’s?
I use my PC as a DVR and would like to burn the shows I record to DVD to watch on my big screen. Usually just once and then I don’t need it anymore.
Is there a reliable DVD RW that could handle being written to and erased multiple times?
Sure you can. If you’re careful with the discs you can get quite a lot of burns out of them. I have a few that have been burned at least a dozen times, but I’ve only had a DVD burner for a few months.
My favourite DVD+RW media is Ritek. Cheap, good.
When I bought my drive I spilled $9 plus about $2 shipping on a 10 pack of Legacy 4x +RW’s. That was before I had visited this forum, or thoroughly read through scans in the BenQ forum (the drive I purchased). I knew they had to be low quality, and it was just an experiment.
Well, the Legacy’s are INFODISC A10’s, which are about the cheapest quality RW’s around. Marginally effective, my BenQ 1620 has been able to make reliable burns with them for data and video.
I have a cheap ($28) Cyberhome that can’t play RW, but the Zenith and the Daewoo combo units both play these with little or no trouble. The Zenith skipped a little on one disk, and the scan did have a large spike at 2Gbytes on that one, but the others have given me little problem so far.
I won’t buy the Legacy again. Almost anything of reputation would be better, and I’d expect a player that can handle RW at all would do just fine with reasonable quality RW’s - especially since these junk ones actually have done the job.
Players are picky, though - the more recent (no matter how cheap), the better off you are. My friend’s Yamaha, which can’t handle even SVCD’s, is one of those that requires the book-type be set to DVD-ROM. That can’t handle the RW either, even with the book type set.
I have a lot of DVD+RW discs that were recorded using a Philips DVD recorder (DVDR 75). I would now like to reuse some of those DVD’s in my computer’s DVD burner, but have had no luck. I’ve tried erasing them first, using the Philips recorder, and also Nero & Easy CD/DVD Creator. I’ve also tried reformatting by right-clicking on the drive letter and it wouldn’t format either. Any suggestions?
Thanks!
Try a few cycles of quick erase and full erase, alternating, with Nero or CDSpeed. If you have inCD or DirectCD installed, remove it.
