DVD
Burner & Blank Media
Compatibility Report |
Chapter 1 - What is the most
popular media format?
CD vs. DVD : It's not a big surprise, the DVD format
is getting more and more popular. In December 2005, we found
out that 80% of users were
burning on DVD. Today, we see that the trend has increased to 90%.
This is also due to the fact that most VSO and affiliate products do not offer
the option to burn on CD. At this time only BlindWrite and CopyToDVD are
still used to produce CD copies.

DVD = 90%
CD = 10% of total burns
Now let's look at the use of different DVD formats. They are divided into 3
categories + , – (R and RW) and DL media.

DVD format graph
| Media
Type |
# of Uses
|
# of Successful
Burns
|
Ratio
|
| DVD-R
|
6 371 049
|
6 013 915
|
94.39%
|
| DVD+R
|
5 005 329
|
4 782 319
|
95.54%
|
| CD-R
|
1 175 788
|
1 043 754
|
88.77%
|
| DVD+RW
|
711 950
|
667 523
|
93.76%
|
| DVD-RW
|
222 716
|
198 241
|
89.01%
|
| CD-RW
|
166 577
|
139 814
|
83.93%
|
| DVD+R DL
|
147 476
|
130 807
|
88.70%
|
| DVD-RW
|
106 738
|
94 789
|
88.81%
|
| DVD-R DL
|
4 419
|
3 809
|
86.20%
|
| DVD-RAM
|
4 216
|
3 160
|
74.95%
|
DVD format details [sorted by uses]
They are divided into 4 big categories, the R (writable
one time only), the RW (writable several times), RAM media
and the Double Layer (capacity of 9 GB, like commercial
DVD movies) which is available for both + and - formats now.
R format (+/-) is used 91.3% of the time while RW amounts
to 8,7% . The DL format , despite being heavily promoted
by drive and media manufacturers, represents only 1.1% of
the total burns.
RAM is not popular with VSO products as it only accounts for 0.05 %!
For those who wonder which is the best format between + and
- , here is what our survey unveils: the – format is more popular, while
+ is a little bit more reliable with a 95,2 % success rate.
For the RW format, the + is also the best choice as far as
reliability is concerned. The Double Layer formats are still not very
popular and you can see the overall failure rate is higher than for single
layer. This is due to a lot of compatibility issues, media quality and complex
technology.