Here is some information about burning CDs and DVDs that was put together by Philip in the AV Office in response to an email query, but I figured it might be useful for others as well. Thanks Philip!
Potential issues to bear in mind when you are going to copy a CD/DVD from an original (and possible reasons why copies of original discs sometimes don’t work on some computers):
- Speed of copying: 40x is the safest/recommended speed for copying CD/DVDs. Sometimes higher values are not supported by CD-ROM/DVD-ROM/DVD Players.
- The kind of CD/DVD to use for copied material: What is the speed of the CD/DVD? For DVD you also need to know whether it’s + or - type disc you need. Make sure that you know what kind of DVD disc your DVD writer supports (PLUS or MINUS), and also what is the max speed (x2,x4,x8,x18) it supports when you buy the blank DVD disc. Not all DVD writers support the + type disc.
- The codec format of the original disc and the disc you are copying to must be same. This may be an issue if you have codecs installed at home that you don’t have at school, i.e. that a disc you burn at home may not work at school.
- DVD/CD movie copies should be treated as a final disc, meaning you must close it using the copying software. In other words, you can not reuse the disc. You SHOULD NOT use CD-RW or DVD-RW disc as a target disc.
- Software players (e.g. PowerDVD, VLC, Windows Media Player, Quicktime, etc.) should have the right codec to play the disc that was copied. To learn more about codecs, go to http://people.csail.mit.edu/tbuehler/video/codecs/intro.html. MPEG2 is the usual codec that is being used for DVDs, but sometimes the audio codec differs on particular DVDs. You will normally be able to find out which codec was used in the Menu of the DVD, but this menu is not present on every DVD disc.
- Make sure that the disc doesn’t have a copyright protection on it, or the copy will not work. Some DVD discs (originals) come with a warning that they are copyright protected, some don’t.
As brought up in my previous post (on digital citizenship), there are also potential copyright issues to consider, but I won’t rehash that here.
