Shopping for DVD Recorders is hard enough these days without the added confusion of knowing what type of disc you can use in them. After all we may only want to save our favourite TV series to disc or just watch DVD movies from time to time so how difficult can that be?

Well, for some of us it can be very difficult indeed and there can be nothing more annoying than buying a state of the art DVD Recorder then finding out that your disc is not compatible and you cannot view your favourite movie. Some DVD Recorders will also only play Region specific DVDs.

The main point of this article is to make you more aware of the DVD/Disc variations that you may encounter and how they relate to the DVD Recorder / Drive and so help you make more informed choices. The fast pace of technology overtakes us some times and this is especially true of the digital media sector where new products seem to be introduced to us, the consumers, at an ever increasing rate. None more so than in the case of data or media storage and play back. We can all probably still remember audio cassette tapes and Video cassettes which were more or less made redundant with the advent of CDs and DVDs. These developments provided us with better quality sounds, much better quality movies and the potential to store more of these on just one disc. Higher tech Player / Recorders / Drives were also developed on which to run these new CDs and DVDs.

Currently the main disc types that you are likely to see around are as follows:

DVD-R; is a disc you can record on only once and cannot be changed. A typical disc will hold around 4.7GB of memory and has approximately 6.5 times more storage capacity than a CD-R. This type of DVD is okay for recording and saving your favourite movie or television series safe in the knowledge that you or someone else cannot inadvertently record over it. Also important when saving any computer data or backup files etc. DVD-R DL discs are a derivative of the DVD-R in that they are dual layered (DL) which means they can store over 8.5GB per side per disc. If you want to use this type of disc make sure your DVD Recorder or DVD ROM Drive is Dual layer compatible.

DVD+R; is a competing divergent from the DVD-R format. This type of disc is also a write once only disc and also has double layered version shown as DVD+R DL. Hybrid drives / Recorders that can handle both are very popular and are often labelled DVD