In recent months I have had much time to research and have come to notice that the issue of burning compatible DVDs for standalone players is increasingly disturbing.

Having worked on this for several years and made many tests with specialist friends, I can say that the method presented below is 100% secure. As a matter of fact, I do TV coverage and corporate film making and have used this method to burn thousands of DVDs which have probably been read by all types of standalone players and never have any DVDs been returned by a client due to illegibility.

I actually made several tests on different DVD players (friends, family, customers etc.) and these have always resulted in a successful read, even on the old-version players that theoretically do not accept burned DVDs.

Enough with the introduction; below you will see a summary of the method: the five rules to follow to burn a 100% compatible DVD.

Use RecordNowMax

Indeed there has never been a better choice. True, the best version (4.5) is neither very cute nor very ergonomic but it is pretty darn effective and is still two steps ahead of the other burning software, even though the other software (Nero for example) are improving greatly. However, make sure to properly set RecordNowMax, check out the set up parameters.

Burn using a good DVD burner

In order to obtain clean, all-round and above all high quality DVDs, a very good DVD burner is a must have. So if you want the best of the best with regard to quality, you will want to use Pioneer burners. Pioneer burners are almost perfect. And no, I’m not an affiliate for pioneers; it’s just that their burners are so darn good.

Use a good support

The crappy bulpak DVD at 0.0000001 cents should be proscribed. Nowadays, the best supports cost a penny compared to their prices three years back. Indeed, nothing irritates me more than hearing someone tell me that they destroyed half of their prints because they bought crappy DVDs but prefer that method because according to them it is better to pay the lowest possible price. No kidding, there are lots of people out there who maintain such crazy beliefs. For three years now, thousands of Memorex-brand DVDs have been burned by us without failure.

Burn DVD at the right speed

Even if today some supports and burners burn at a 16x speed, the acceptable maximum speed to burn a good compatible DVD seems to be 4x. We never exceed that speed.

Add an AUDIO_TS file.

Some authoring apps like "Encore" do not create an AUDIO_TS file along side the VIDEO_TS when creating the DVD. However, we noticed that on some old players, the absence of this empty folder on the DVD made it unreadable to some decks. So it should be systematically added if absent. But be careful to create an empty folder called AUDIO_TS and not add a file and name it Audio ts or audio-TS or AUDIOTS like some people do. In short, the folder name MUST be AUDIO_TS and it must be empty.

One last thing that I still read on many forums, do not forget that the key to the compatibility of DVD playback on standalone players is 99% AT THE TIME OF THE BURNING.

Ah, before I forget, when creating your DVD, during compression you do not exceed 8000kb/s everything inclusive (video + audio) as the standard DVD compression ratio indicates a maximum of 8000kb/s for players. For recent readers, going up to 10/11000 kb / s will not be a problem. But for older readers, having encoded at more than 8,000 kb / s will make the DVD unreadable or jerky. In short, a sixth rule I forgot: compress your videos at a maximum of 8000 kb/s throughout.

Happy BURNING