I just wanted to add a few words about Quality Control, which is very important. The only way to get decent results is to take great care right from the shoot. The problem you are running headlong into here is one of scaling from 1920x1080 in square pixels to 720x576 in anamorphic (non-square pixels at a ratio of almost 1.4:1, making your pixels almost half as wide again as they are in height. You are also shooting a lossy form (probably Long GOP MPEG) as you are getting MEPG-2 transport streams. SO you are starting out in a lossy form to begin with, then (if I am reading this correctly) rendering that to another interim lossy format & then finally transcoding that down to a third lossy stream of MPEG-2 for DVD. The best results will always be obtained with the minimum of messing around, so can you give this a try instead: 1 - Shoot as you normally do, import this into Premiere & edit as desired. Import the footage into the Project Browser, check it is correctly interpreted then right click it & select "new sequence from clip" so you can be sure the sequence is correctly set up. 2 - From Premiere, make an interim version at the correct PAR and resolution but using a 10-bit lossless codec, such as Quicktime Animation or Lagarith Lossless AVI - just be very careful that your resolution is set to PAL 720x576 Widescreen, and that your field order is correct for the source footage as well. (MediaInfo will tell you this - it is a free download). It is also a good idea to make absolutely certain Premiere has correctly interpreted the footage as well - go to the project browser, right click & select "Modify > Interpret footage" and make 100% certain the file settings that are there match what you see in MediaInfo. This really is important as an incorrect field order will wreck your day. In your render dialogue, make sure you DO have "Use Maximum Render Quality" checked as this can improve the scaling. In your export module, switch between the options "Scale to Fit" and Scale to Fill" to get the best fit, but be aware that you are downscaling (otherwise known as "degrading") your source footage. This cannot be helped. If you intend to put the final output to DVD and not Blu-ray then there is little point shooting in HD and you might as well shoot in SD from the get go as at least in doing this you will skip over the degradation stage altogether. If you can shoot in SD - pick the highest quality your camera can shoot at, preferably a lossless one. This cannot be overstated enough. 3 - When you come to make your final MPEG-2, do not multiplex. This will inevitably trigger a second transcoding. Encore prefers to be fed with elementary streams, meaning an M2V and a WAV file. Do not use CBR. Use a quality 5 VBR 2-pass. Set your minimum rate to no lower than 2.8Mbps. Set your maximum bitrate to no more than 8Mbps Set your Target Bitrate to 6 or 7Mbps. Set "Use Maximum Bit Depth". Do NOT set "Use Maximum Render Quality" Make sure your field order is correct. Render. The results should be as good as you will get them unless you start spending serious money on encoders such as CCE-SP or CineVision. The MainConcept engine in Premiere is the same as the one in CineVision, it just does not have so many options for tweaking. Make your GOP structure a multiple of the frame rate as far as possible (for NTSC use a GOP if 15, for PAL experiment & see what you get) One other thing you can try an experiment with. Try shooting in 24fps progressive scan (better still 23.976) and leave this frame rate throughout as well as the progressive scan setting. Modern upscaling players will handle this natively & give you a proper PS output - older ones will add pull automatically as the AME has a setting for DVD 24p (tweak as before for bitrate etc) that will still allow playback. This is a trick Hollywood have used for decades now & it works well, but you must start in progressive scan at the shoot. Hope this helps ... View more

Hi bearguy9. To try & answer your 3 workflow questions: 1 - Yes it does, although not owning a mac I cannot possibly comment on how good (or not) Apple's Compressor is. 2 - Yes it will - we use ProRes all the time with no trouble at all. Even on PC. 3 - There are still applications out there, although what you can get for Mac OS is well outside my knowledge. PC always was the way to go for authoring applications. I still stand by the statement/speculation I made previously as to why Encore was dropped, and I firmly believe it was nothing to do with "the industry is moving away from replicated media" as this is pure BS. Yes, DVD sales are down but this is mainly because the major labels are not releasing stuff anybody wants to buy in music terms and most of what they did release was poor quality - I know I got sick to death of second rate live concert films that looked as if they had been shot in hand held cameras using Dolby Digital for the audio content - a music release should never use anything except LPCM to my mind as AC3 is the DVD equivalent of MP3 and simply should not be welcome on any music release. It's been well proved that if you make the discs of good quality with desirable content, people will buy them. Streaming on demand is a flash in the pan that will soon go away as well - it will linger on for low quality stuff but not much more. Let's look at the downsides that somehow never get mentioned: 1 - Choice is actually quite limited once you get past the first few weeks of any service. Netflix looks like it has a lot, but it doesn't, not really - less than old style rental stores used to carry. 2 - Bandwidth is limited for probably 75% of internet connections. I see advertised "deals" with caps from 5 to 20Gb "usage allowance" - that is usage, not download. In the current economy most people will vote with their wallets. T'interweb is great for emails, cat photos etc but for most people it is an expensive luxury to have unrestricted access (mine costs me £100 every month) 3 - No streaming company has ever actually made a profit in the long term. I suspect the reason Rovi bought Sonic Solutions (the people who owned the author core for Encore) was specifically to shut them down and remove the competition, which considering their main business is streaming on demand, makes perfect sense to me. 4 - People have been saying "CD is dead" and "Vinyl is dead" for years now yet both refuse to go away. Replicated content is - and always will be - king. ... View more

Hey Isaac. Discs ain't dead, not even mostly dead, and all who advocate dumping replicated media for a streamed on demand model are doing everyone - themselves included - a huge dis-service. I say again, 33% of households in the UK have no internet access at all. Even those who do have it tend to have either slow or bandwidth limited connections - and I get fed up with hearing on the news all the time that because I live in West London i am supposed to have this high speed internet & G4? Dream right on - no G4 and no fibre available where I am at all, just twisted copper pair and an absolute maximum downstream of 6Mbps if I am lucky & there are not too many others on a contention ratio I am told by insiders at BT is in the region of 200/1 where they have massively oversold the capacity of the system. Then there are the thousands & thousands who sign up to special deals - again let me quote BT';s "great summer sale" where you have a monthly USAGE limitation (note, usage, not downloads) of just 10Gb/month. Given these days of austerity do you really think many households will have the unrestricted service constant streaming will require? Nope, they will not is the answer and again streaming is another way to bump up your monthly data bills. It is greed driven and nothing else. Moving right along. How much longer do you think the current online anarchy will last? All streaming sites are getting monetized now and sooner or later it always ends up at pay per view, with all "free" content being either seriously limited in scope (NetFlix has less on it now than Sky On Demand does) or else missing altogether. Plus the streamed quality is, let us be quite honest, usually not up to very much. Replicated content once bought is yours for life. Streamed or downloaded gets you a file that easily corrupts ... View more

jvalal wrote: If there was a strong business case for Adobe to acquire the engine they could.  It's bad business that they didn't do one of many things. 1. Include some contingency in the contract if said company went out of business they would have an opportunity to take over the core or code 2. When or if said company was going out of business someone from adobe could have reached out to said company.  If you were going out of business you'd want to leverage any opportunity to generate revenue, even if you were closing your doors. So in my mind this "issue" could have been avoided with better contracts or simply just common sense.  Someone has that core code and it's not just disappeared.  Adobe just decided not to pursue it. If you sell cars and the company that you buy engines from is closing their doors AND you want to keep selling those cars you either buy that business, buy the IP, or reverse engineer the engines to work in your car. Camtasia will do what I need at this time. Not necessarily true. If, as I suspect, Rovi killed Sonic to protect their streaming on demand models then they will not let anyone else get the authorcores. ... View more

Isaac T. wrote: Unfortunately, we're all in that weird place where discs are dying, but you can't tell your clients, "Haven't you heard? Discs are dead." We have DVD Studio Pro, but it can't do Blu-Ray. The only other pro option would be Scenarist, but... we're not authoring for the Criterion Collection. If any Criterion staff are reading, though, we're available. Oh please! DVD is not dead, discs are not dead - this is all BS from streaming on demand freaks who want to believe this. Scenarist is no longer available because Rovi (who bought Sonic) seem to have bought it with the sole intention of killing off what they see as competition. Macs have never been any use for Blu-Ray authoring either as Jobs did not approve of it,. and there were never any of the decent tools available on Mac OS. Scenarist SD/BD = PC apps. Sony Blu-Print - PC Sony DoStudio - PC Nothing else can create AACS formatted replication masters so unless you have one of those 3 tools, forget replication. There was an add-on available for Encore to create BDCMF replication folders but if Encore is not running on latest Mac OS it is futile - which starts to beg the question "why update to a new OS that breaks the software you rely on to earn a living?" ... View more

Jeff A Wright wrote: Neil Wilkes please try solution 2 in CC desktop lists applications as "Up to Date" when not installed - http://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/kb/aam-lists-removed-apps-date.html. The problem is I am not getting any visual feedback at all - impossible to tell, as what you see in the screenshot is all I get. ... View more

Same problem here as well. Currently failed on the following: InDesign CC 2014 Flash Professional CC and Mobile Device packaging 2014 Audition CC 2014 InCopy CC 2014 Media Encoder CC 2014 Prelude CC 2014 Premiere Pro CC 2014 Illustrator CC 2014 Photoshop CC 2014 The common link between every single failure is the C++ 2014 and this is bizarre because I know for an absolute certainty that C++ is perfectly up to date and okay on this system. This is frankly a complete shambles. ... View more

John T Smith wrote: Some pain in the budget... but at least I had options, unlike people who have software that has no upgrade path Such as Scenarist SD, sad to say. No upgrade path from SD to BD (version 4 was the 2D and version 5 was the 3D, and again no upgrade between the 2). Sony's DVD Architect is probably the best low budget BD/DVD package right now if not the only one. ... View more

Tento wrote: Very clear explanation, thanks Neil. It all makes great sense now. I do not understand why Adobe just didn't tell us that in the first place, it would have avoided a grand majority of useless discussion of begging Adobe to make an Encore CC version. Big corporations like Adobe aren't always very good at communicating... that's too bad. You're welcome. Don't be too hard on Adobe though - I suspect the suudden demise of Sonic Solutions came as much of a surprise to them as it did to the rest of us. They probably had battallions of people trying tio work out where Encore stood as a result, and I suspect that will be down to who held onto the rights of their authoring software. My money is on Rovi buying to shut down one major player in the game and try to give credence to the "optical media is dead" cry that seems all over the place right now (their business is of course streaming on demand) but then I am an old cynic. ... View more

My apologies for duff info. ... View more

It's my understanding Encore CS6 does not come with CC. It is EOL. ... View more

jamesp2 wrote: There should be no sync issue.  Virtually all "24p" material in the HD world is recorded at 23.976, so it's playing back in PP at the correct, real-time speed.  You'd only have problem if you were playing back true 24fps at 23.976, and your audio was running real-time.  In that rare case, you'd have to slow your double-system audio down .1%, to avoid drift. In the film world, audio is routinely "pulled up" and "pulled down" .1% to account for these speed changes, going from video to film and vice versa, but in the world of HD acquisition, nobody has to worry about it any more.  Everything is 23.976, so everything plays back at the speed it was recorded. It's not sync that is the issue here for me, it is accurate placement of chapter markers (or in a music title where it is critical - song markers). Premiere also gets this one badly wrong in SD - it uses a 30fps base, but what is needed is 29.97DF. I cannot understand this omission - it is the one thing that Vegas Pro gets done better than Premiere (and I mean the ONLY thing - Premiere knocks Vegas into a cocked hat in all other respects) as it offers the timebase in whatever timecode you need to use - so gives 24p, 23.976 (aka 24p drop frame), 30, 29.97DF, 29.97NDF etc. Why can Premiere not give us the same flexibility, as converting supplied EDL to conform with Premiere's clunky approach is time consuming at best & damned annoying at worst ... View more

MannyEdwards wrote: So is it even possible to create a Blu Ray compliant file in Encore to send out for replication? If the people you are sending it out to have the necessary add-on by Rivergate Software 1 - BluStreak Tracer 2 - BDCMF Export Add-On You need both, as the important one (BDCMF Export) only seems to run alongside the other one - so it's a $600 investment. Pretty cheap option - although it is Mac OSX (10.6 & later) only. If you are on PC, you have no way to get this done. The problem is the mandatory AACS scrambling, and Encore simply cannot do this. ... View more

Joe Riggs wrote: I  was curious what software do the studios use or Criterion, is it BluPrint? Note to Adobe and Apple .- People still need to author dvds and blu rays, if you are a videographer or filmmaker, you are most likely going to deliver a disc at some point.   Now with Apple we know they don't care, but I thought Adobe listened to professionals? When was there an outcry from professionals saying they don't need Encore? To quote Stan Jones over at the cow boards: I think it is ultimately that Adobe does not want to invest the money/programming resources to fix problems. It is absurd to say that Encore is not being brought into CC because the future is somewhere else. Hiya Joe. Most of the big studios use Scenarist - always have, always will. For regular DVD, it is either Scenarist, Maestro or DVDSP (which used to be Maestro before Apple screwed it up). I honestly believe the reason Encore is dropped is because the authorcore was licensed from Sonic, who no longer exist having been killed off by Rovi (who are a streaming media company that bought Sonic out in a hostile takeover & closed them down 2 years later). Not sure why behaviour like this is even legal. ... View more

bigmanfontu wrote: If you're primarily going to be making DVD's, I would try DVDRemake Pro.  It's not the most user friendly, and requires knowledge of registers and the DVD structure, but it makes up for it by being extremely powerful. I generally design my DVD menus in photoshop, compile with Encore and then put the DVD's together with DVDRemake Pro, mostly because Encore doesn't support DVD navigation programming. You can check it out here:  http://www.dimadsoft.com/dvdremakepro/ Interesting - is that for Mac? On PC we have something called PGCEdit - it allows 100% complete access to all navigational/menu/buttons etc and you can edit what is alteady compiled. The biggest problem with Encore is the way that it turns each timeline into a single clip VTS - the amount of dummy menus required is insane. ... View more

Yellamokara wrote: 1 - DoStudio. This comes as a modular tool, and starts very cheaply indeed with the DoStudio Indie option (Straight BDMV only) or the EX addon module, and you can also get the BD-J module as well as a 3D module. Unlike Scenarist, the basic version is fully expandable. It costs ~$2500. Is that "very cheaply"? Compared to what you will have to pay for BluPrint ($50,000 and upwards plus the encoders), compared to what you woiuld have had to pay for Scenarist (2D vertsion was £25,000 retail, and if you wanted to go to 3D you had to pay a similar amount as there was never any upgrade path fromn Scenarist SD > BD > BD3D) and even compared to what I had to pay for DoStudio when it was still NetBlender (I paid £5000 for the base mode, plus additional for the EX & BD-J, coming in at a total of £13,000) then yes - I would say a pitiful $2500 that gets you an application capable of replication (which is something Encore never dould do) is VERY cheap indeed. It may be well to remember that technically, Encore cannot create BluRay discs - it can create BD-ROM, but Encore's output certainly should never be described as BluRay bevcause it isn't. No written disc is "BluRay" and no written discs should carry the BD logo because it is non compliant. ... View more

AlistairGraham wrote: Please give me  suggestions for Adobe compeditors to DVD and Blu Ray authoring since I can no longer rely on Adobe as they are dropping Encore becasue its so 2010 and discs are not the future (what a load of BS) Indeed it is pure BS. The main reason Encore is dead is (I suspect) because Rovi have killed Sonic off completely - which is to my mind a nasty thing to do because their main business is streaming media and it seems they bought Sonic in order to kill them off & remove the main competitor. Streaming on demand means you pay every time you watch a film, assuming you have A - a fast enough internet connection, and B - an unrestricted one (most are not, despite the adverts saying "completely unrestricted" they will be throttled back under the small print "fair use" terms). The internet is one of the few areas where "unrestricted" does not mean unrestricted, rather like telephone companies saying the same thing with "unlimited" that turns out to be nothing of the sort. Thanks to Rovi killing off Scenariost SD/BD and all the MPEG-2 encoding tools, things are difficult. I am not sure what else is still available except for Sony's DVD Architect (definitely a going concern, and unless you include DVDSP it leaves Sony as the only player left now) and - perhaps - Media Chance Lab's "DVD Lab Pro 2" - I will check with the writers to see if new licenses are still available. DLP (as we know DVD-Lab Pro) is a very, very good tool. It does have issues but these can all be worked around and I am waiting to find out of new licenses are still available. Support for this tool is also very good - one of the mainstays in the forums knows more about this app than I can begin to describe & it is very good indeed. I would also recommend any DVD authors to get a copy of the wonderful PGCEdit. It's donationware, but well worth $50 of anybody's money as it allows you to edit a compiled Video_TS without having to go back into authoring again. The other fly in the ointment will of course be getting product to replication as Encore's DDP & CSS functions are seriously unreliable and the layer break routine is a joke. GEAR Pro Mastering Edition is the way forward here and there will soon be an update to this that will, when you create a new project as a DVD9, look for all valid layer break points & give you the choice before master DDP files are created. GPME will also handle CSS scrambling (and does it properly, unlike Encore) and is in my opinion invaluable. BluRay is harder - there are now only 2 applications that can output spec legal BDCMF folders with AACS applied (mandatory).for replication (again, Encore cannot do this at all and required an addon to manage this. Both are owned/coded by Sony Creative Media. 1 - DoStudio. This comes as a modular tool, and starts very cheaply indeed with the DoStudio Indie option (Straight BDMV only) or the EX addon module, and you can also get the BD-J module as well as a 3D module. Unlike Scenarist, the basic version is fully expandable. 2 - BluPrint. This is Sony's top-of-the-line tool, and you will need a remortgage to get into this one. DoStudio is suitable for beginners to intermediate users and requires a good working knowledge of PhotoShop. This is the tool we use (we run DoStudio EX with BD-J module) and have made several successfully replicated titles that passed folder/content verification from Sony DADC with no trouble at all. http://www.mediachance.com/dvdlab/dvdlabpro.html http://download.videohelp.com/r0lZ/pgcedit/index.html http://www.gearsoftware.com/pro-mastering.php http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/dostudio The demise of Encore is a sad day, I believe, as it could have been so good if only the bugs had been nailed, and support for more advanced operations added via scripting. DLP requires a certain amount of knowledge of the structure of DVD - Encore's abstraction layer boxed it into a corner to a great extent and the way every timeline became a new VTS was a nightmare of complexity, as it forced nearly all menus into the VMGM domain. It is full-spec, and there is very little it cannot do. ... View more

Hiya Stan. Thanks to Rovi killing off Scenariost SD/BD and all the MPEG-2 encoding tools, things are difficult. I am not sure what else is still available except for Sony's DVD Architect (definitely a going concern, and unless you include DVDSP it leaves Sony as the only player left now) and - perhaps - Media Chance Lab's "DVD Lab Pro 2" - I will check with the writers to see if new licenses are still available. DLP (as we know DVD-Lab Pro) is a very, very good tool. It does have issues but these can all be worked around and I am waiting to find out of new licenses are still available. Support for this tool is also very good - one of the mainstays in the forums knows more about this app than I can begin to describe & it is very good indeed. I would also recommend any DVD authors to get a copy of the wonderful PGCEdit. It's donationware, but well worth $50 of anybody's money as it allows you to edit a compiled Video_TS without having to go back into authoring again. The other fly in the ointment will of course be getting product to replication as Encore's DDP & CSS functions are seriously unreliable and the layer break routine is a joke. GEAR Pro Mastering Edition is the way forward here and there will soon be an update to this that will, when you create a new project as a DVD9, look for all valid layer break points & give you the choice before master DDP files are created. GPME will also handle CSS scrambling (and does it properly, unlike Encore) and is in my opinion invaluable. BluRay is harder - there are now only 2 applications that can output spec legal BDCMF folders with AACS applied (mandatory).for replication (again, Encore cannot do this at all and required an addon to manage this. Both are owned/coded by Sony Creative Media. 1 - DoStudio. This comes as a modular tool, and starts very cheaply indeed with the DoStudio Indie option (Straight BDMV only) or the EX addon module, and you can also get the BD-J module as well as a 3D module. Unlike Scenarist, the basic version is fully expandable. 2 - BluPrint. This is Sony's top-of-the-line tool, and you will need a remortgage to get into this one. DoStudio is suitable for beginners to intermediate users and requires a good working knowledge of PhotoShop. This is the tool we use (we run DoStudio EX with BD-J module) and have made several successfully replicated titles that passed folder/content verification from Sony DADC with no trouble at all. http://www.mediachance.com/dvdlab/dvdlabpro.html http://download.videohelp.com/r0lZ/pgcedit/index.html http://www.gearsoftware.com/pro-mastering.php http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/dostudio The demise of Encore is a sad day, I believe, as it could have been so good if only the bugs had been nailed, and support for more advanced operations added via scripting. DLP requires a certain amount of knowledge of the structure of DVD - Encore's abstraction layer boxed it into a corner to a great extent and the way every timeline became a new VTS was a nightmare of complexity, as it forced nearly all menus into the VMGM domain. It is full-spec, and there is very little it cannot do. ... View more

To try & state "the world is moving away from physical media" is disingenuous at best and downright pure unadulterated BS at worst. Streaming on demand requires fast broadband - and even in West London - never mind rural areas that have dialup only - we cannot get fibre optic, and according to BT there are "no plans to do so in the near future" either. So we are stuffed with the feckup called Sky Plus. Tried to download a film from that last night - 4 hours, and still a 3.1Gb HD film had not downloaded. Why? Simply put, our broadband here is still twisted pair, and once all the kids get online in the evenings I can watch my downstream speed collapse - literally - to that of dialup. I am not on a cheap connection either, but the best available in my area. Now let's look at other broadband. Given the economy & the mess that the handwringing socialists have made of things spending money they did not have, everyone is screwed financially. Over a third of the UK have no online access at all. Of the 2/3 that do, probably 90% are on restricted connections because people vote with their wallets. Hollywood are trying to go the streaming route because it means that they will be able to charge you every time you watch a film. Think about that - carefully - because that is where they want to go, and they will blame it on "piracy". Real reason Encore is dropped? I think there are 2 of them. 1 - They are boxed into a corner with the Abstraction Layer, and since Premiere got hived off to India, nobody gives a damn any longer. 2 - the most important one. Rovi (who bought Sonic Solutions in a hostile takeover) have dropped all DVD and BluRay authoring tools. Scenarist is gone. Total Code is gone. CineVision is Gone. All support stops - forever - at the end of this year (2013). How this is legal escapes me - a company with a vested interest in a different business model buys the only independent disc production company that is left & closes it down? Remember Rovi are a streaming media company........and that leaves a nasty taste in my mouth. Why does this matter for Encore? Adobe licensed the Author Core from Sonic, who no longer exist, and Rovi owen the rightas to it & doubtless refused to renew the deal because their vested interest is in making you pay again every time you want to watch. Their next stop will be the record business too and again it will be blamed on piracy & low sales. Streaming will never, ever replace physical media. There is no sense of ownership & it is a serious con trick as well. Disgusting. ... View more

That is what I read too - but when I uploaded one it got tucked up in the top left corner of the "custom" setup thumbnail. Perhaps it is just a glitch in that dialogue, but it certainly looked as if there was a raft of space to the right & underneath. Still, probably Pilot Error so I will recheck - thank you Dave. ... View more

John T Smith wrote: >will be having registry issues here So... a Mac has a registry file "similar" to the one in Windows? Not that I know of - but I may be mistaken. AFAIK, to delete an application from a mac you just dump it's folder in the bin - job done. I'm pretty certain there is no registry, or equivalent. This is why the OP made the mistake he did. ... View more

You will be having registry issues here. First port of call is to Adobe Support, and ask them for a clean-up script (if they have one) that will sort this out for you. Essentially, you need to remove every entry in the registry pertaining to Premiere Pro & Encore CS6. It is just possible that as you deleted the program files (and I wager the Adobe Common files were left alone??) a good utility such as Piniform's CClean might be able to get things to the point where you can safely reinstall, but I would defiunitely talk to support in the first instance. ... View more

LordSmurf wrote: The biggest problem with DVD+R DL layer changes is when the disc is not burned with the DVD-ROM booktype. The machine expects a single layer only, when it sees the DVD+R type. Sometimes the layer breaks just aren't well placed either. Ideally, you want to split the content 50/50 as best you can. DVD-R DL is an oddity, as far as I'm concerned. I don't know why they still bother. From what I've heard and read, it's mostly because there's a following in Japan, and I believe all current DVD-R DL are TY discs. That would make sense You don't always want to split 50-50. Not all the time. Suppose you could get the main component on 75/25 splits, with no break in main timeline? Forcing 50-50 splits is a PITA..... Also Verbatim still make DVD-R DL, and I don't really know why they bother either. Probably because + formats are DVD Alliance, and - formats are DVD Forum (the spec designers) and the whole point of the + alliance crowd was simply to avoid paying anyone any roytalties. The exact same reason there are so mnany different video formats too - GREED. ... View more

Some interesting points. I have to admit that I never had trouble with G04 Riteks, and stopped using them when the manufacture started to look a little odd visually. The edges went very rough at one point & I do seem to recall something about patchy dye as well - but honstly was/am under the impression that was the G05 (although I may well be wrong) As far as spec differences go, every DVD-R or DVD+R disc I have written reports as DVD-ROM when examined. I could not agree more about the data needing to be correctly written though. This is an issue that comes up again & again. Not all burn apps are created equal, and I have seen discs where the BUP & IFO files are rammed so tightly together (without the padding) that they are causing problems. It's also far too common seeing files written to disc in the wrong order. Player requirements have not really changed - written support is strictly optional, never has been mandated. It would be a stupid manufacturer that did not go for this though. Dito the +R/RW format too. I prefer +R for RW & DL projects by a long way - -R DL support is patchy at best even now. It's still annoying though when you hit a player that is okay with +R but will not see layer 1 on a +R DL disc even though it has no trouble with Layer 0. Good discussion though. ... View more