DVD+R vs. DVD-R
When deciding whether to buy a DVD+R or DVD-R drive, it should be noted that DVD+R is becoming the format of choice these days. It is technically superior to DVD-R. It also ships with DELL PCs, a significant factor in predicting de facto standard winners. While you may buy a dual-format DVD burner, you can rest assured that buying a DVD+R burner will be fine.
As for media prices, there does not seem to be a difference in price between the two types of blank DVDs nowadays.
PAL vs. NTSC
My first DVD was in fact created in PAL format. One thing to realize is that most DVD players will happily and automatically convert between the 2 formats NTSC and PAL. So even in the US you can easily test your PAL creation in your home DVD player without worrying about funny things being shown by your TV.
Sonic Foundry's DVD Architect 1.0 is a great choice for those brave souls wanting to dabble in DVD authoring at home. The user interface is intuitive and makes DVD authoring seem like a breeze. But due to the newness of this product and DVD technology in general, there are bugs and quirks in the product that you will have to sort out before you reach your DVD goals. Here's a sample of my problems. I'm sure there are many more waiting to be discovered.
Slide show
A nice feature of DVD Architect (DVD-A) is the ability to easily create a slide show out of a number of photos. It's important to realize that, when creating a slide show, a running video is essentially created. This video consists of the sequence of photos with a predetermined pause in between. So the longer the pauses between the photos, the more space the slide show will take. I found that for my taste 3 seconds was the right balance between speed and size; your mileage may vary.
Also, a bug in earlier builds of DVD-A prevented rotated photos from staying rotated when the project was saved. An update to the patch 1.0c solved that problem.
Estimated Size in Optimize DVD
The first thing you will notice when running DVD-A's Optimize DVD function is that the estimated size is compared against 3.95 GB media instead of the more common 4.700 GB media. The solution here is to go to the DVD-A Options.
Then you might be wondering what GB actually means. Does it mean gigabytes as we traditionally know them or billions of bytes? And how close can we safely optimize to 100% of the media size?
Trying to figure those things out was impossible because the numbers just did not make sense any way I twisted it. Until I installed the 1.0c update. This update definitely changed the way the estimated size was calculated. But that still doesn't answer our questions. Well, after burning one CD, it became somewhat clear that MB refers to millions of bytes and GB refers to billions of bytes.
In other words, it is safe for you to optimize all the way up to, and including, 100% of the media size, as stated by DVD-A.
(NOTE: the numbers still don't make complete sense as you would expect the estimated size to say 4700MB when you optimize to 100%, but instead it says 4812MB. This would seem to indicate that MBs are still referring to megabytes. But I recommend you just ignore this quirk and just rely on the 100% measure.)
Bitrate in Optimize DVD
A newbie to the DVD scene might wonder what bitrate to choose when optimizing a DVD in DVD-A. I tend to be fairly lenient when it comes to video quality and I found that 3 Mbps, instead of the default 8 Mbps, worked fine for me. This allowed me to fit 2 hours of video and 5 photo slides, including hundreds of photos spaced 3 seconds apart, onto a 4.7GB DVD+R.
Burning DVD+RW
When trying to burn a blank DVD+RW, DVD-A will burn the lead-in and then simply stop without burning the actual content. It will then claim success. There's no bug fix at this point. But the workaround, as suggested in the Sonic Foundry forums, is to burn some sort of sample DVD, using for example Sonic MyDVD. Then you can let DVD-A burn over your DVD+RW.
In the end, burning a DVD+RW still failed for me, as certain chapters in my DVD could not be found by any of my players. I simply turned to a demo version of Ahead's Nero Burning ROM to burn the DVD files prepared by DVD-A, which did the trick. I don' t know if this problem applies to DVD+R because I'm not going to burn a write-once DVD unless either I can successfully burn a DVD+RW first or the price of DVD+R media drops significantly.
