Having burned about 1500 dvd with Nero 6.6 I would like to pass on a few comments. Avoid blank media from Memorex, TDK, and expecially Maxell. These were reliable brands in the days of audio tape but that is no longer true in the case of dvd media. Keeping burn speeds down to 8x or less will produce fewer coasters. External dvd burners do not have dma capability. Unreliable blank media, as mentioned above, usually fail about 80-90% thru the burn program which leads me to believe they are short of dye material at the end of the disc. I have found the following to be helpful with problem discs. When burning with Nero recode 2 unclick the "fit to target" box and reduce the video quality slightly to not fill the disc completely. The most reliable blank media I have used is Verbatim 16x dvd-r and Sony 16x dvd-r. Stand alone dvd players have superior error correction and will usually play a bad disc that will not go on your pc. Dirty rental discs with lots of finger prints and scratches can often be cleaned with spray eyeglass cleaner which is safe for plastic lenses. Use dvddecrypter or dvd shrink to test a suspected bad disc before burning. This will show up unrecoverable data errors before you end up with a coaster. Most data errors are of the type where the video and sound will stall for several seconds. I hope these tips will be usefull. mrmanny
