Creating video DVDs using an external USB DVD writer

[Bob72]

Hello,   My 9-year old Win 10 laptop is showing its age, and I will probably have to buy a new machine in 2024.  My current laptop has an integrated DVD writer drive, and I use Adobe Premiere Elements 15 to create DVD videos watchable on my Panasonic DVD player/recorder.

My options for a new PC are very limited if I require an integrated DVD writer, as opposed to using an external USB DVD writer. 

So my question is:
Does anyone have experience of creating video DVDs from Adobe Premiere using an external (USB) DVD writer?  In theory, an external DVD drive should work just as well as an on-board drive, but I want to make sure that there aren't any unexpected problems with DVD creation from PE 15.

Finally, the new PC will be a Win 11 PC.  Will I still be able to use my current Premiere Elements 15 software under Win 11, or will I have to buy a newer version?

Any feedback will be most appreciated.

[Steve Grisetti]

You should be able to run Premiere Elemenets 15 on Windows 11. The operating systems are not that different.

But you'll likely have trouble creating DVDs directly to an external drive using Premiere Elements 15. Best solution is to output the DVD files as a folder or an ISO file on your hard drive and then use a program like ImgBurn to burn the DVD files to a disc. ImgBurn will likely have not problems burning to an external drive.

Here's my tutorial on how to use it.

[Bob72 · Accepted solution]

Many thanks, Steve - the tutorial was very helpful. 
I suspected that there might be a few gottchas around burning directly from PE15 to an external drive.

[John T Smith]

I built my desktop and I have a DVD writer in my tower case and I still always create an ISO for 2 reasons

1 - an ISO is easy to copy to a USB flash drive to have a backup of the finished video

2 - Imgburn has MANY options to control the writing process... the main one for me being able to specify a 'slow' write speed to be sure the resulting DVD will be the best possible quality

[Bob72]

Thanks John, writing the DVD in two steps does make a lot of sense.
In the past, I've probably been lucky in writing directly from PE 15 without encountering write errors.

[John T Smith]

More on imgburn https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-elements-discussions/imgburn/td-p/13185708