DVD compatibility with CDR media

Are Digital Versatile Discs really that versatile? “Our studio has been making CD-R dupes for quite a while. We recently had a customer who purchased a new Sony DVD player for his home. He could not play our CD-R dupes on his DVD player. He had no trouble playing them in his car, or on his “old” CD player. Is there a compatibility problem between CD-R recordings and DVD players?” While the official DVD specification doesn’t require that DVD players work with Red Book CD’s, virtually all the players available claim this benefit. For all practical purposes, however, most of the current crop of DVD players are not working with CDR discs. We have on occasion seen a CDR work in a DVD player, but more often than not it is no go. The problem is that while a CDR may conform to the Red Book standard (much of which is for formatting) the dyes used in many CDR discs are almost invisible to the DVD laser wavelength. The results are actually somewhat better with CD-RW discs because their dyes show up better to the typical DVD laser. Some manufacturers are building hardware with dual lasers (using different wavelengths) or switchable optics for increased compatibility, but of course they cost more, which doesn’t solve the problem of playing your CDR discs in the “typical” consumer machine. Drives with the MultiRead label guarantee compatibility with CD-R and CD-RW media. An effort to develop CD-R “Type II” media compatible with both CD and DVD wavelengths has been abandoned. This leaves us with no perfect solution. The best workaround right now is actually to use CD-RW media (in a compatible writer of course) as they usually work. Of course CD-RW doesn’t work in all CD players or CD ROM drives. What’s that saying…? “Standards must be great. That’s why we have so many.”

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