Hopefully this topic will be pinned, I will cover the basics around burning DVD's.
Blank Media. Choose quality media - cheap media may work fine for your computer, but they don't always for general DVD players. I recommend always using either Taiyo Yuden or Verbatim.
DVD-R is usually best for single-layer discs, and DVD+R DL is best for dual-layer discs. It's usually best to burn at a slow speed, such as 4x even if the media is faster. You must set booktype to DVD-ROM when burning DVD+R discs, otherwise they'll be incompatible with many DVD players (to do this in ImgBurn select Tools > Drive > Change Book Type and select your Drive manufacturer).
Software. The only burning program you need is ImgBurn. Use it to burn ISO files, or to build ISO images from files. If you need to transcode your movie from DL to SL, use DVD Shrink which is still the best freeware transcoder and always use 2-pass encoding. 2-Pass means that before actually encoding it goes through and investigates which scenes need more compression and which need less, thereby increasing the overall quality by allocating more space for more complicated scenes.
Hardware. Burners are a dime a dozen these days, but it's always good to use the latest firmware, and a good site for this is rpc1.org. Make sure DMA is enabled for the drive. If it's not burning will be too slow, and the discs may jump or be otherwise defective in DVD Players. To check if DMA is enabled open device manager (Start > Run > "devmgmt.msc"), select IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers and click on either "Primary IDE Channel" or "Secondary IDE Channel" - or whichever your Burner is connected to (if you're not sure just check both). Rich click and select properties and open the "advanced settings tab". Transfer mode should always be on "DMA if available", and the "current transfer mode" hopefully reads Ultra DMA Mode 2 (or mode 4 or whatever). It should look something like this:
But if it doesn't, it may look like this:
Which probably means you don't have it connected to an 80-wire cable. There's a few ways to fix this problem - the best way is to use an 80-wire IDE cable. Go out buy one and connect it up. If you want an immediate solution then read on...
If you only have 1 HDD and 1 DVD-RW (and no other IDE devices), simply try disconnecting the DVD-RW from the primary cable and connect it to the secondary IDE channel (so long as you do have a second IDE cable). Even if you have more IDE devices you may still be able to connect the DVD-RW to an empty IDE Channel depending on how many your motherboard has (mine only has two).
If you can't do this - or like me you have 3 HDD's and 1 DVD-RW, then another thing that does work is setting the DVD-RW as the master device on it's cable, and the HDD as the slave. All that is required to do this is to change the jumper settings on the HDD and the DVD-RW. However do remember if you do this you may need to update your BIOS if doing this changes the boot-device (unlikely). This is how it's set up in my computer, and it does limit the HDD to DMA Mode 2 instead of DMA Mode 4, but the difference that makes to a HDD is miniscule.
Blank Media. Choose quality media - cheap media may work fine for your computer, but they don't always for general DVD players. I recommend always using either Taiyo Yuden or Verbatim.
DVD-R is usually best for single-layer discs, and DVD+R DL is best for dual-layer discs. It's usually best to burn at a slow speed, such as 4x even if the media is faster. You must set booktype to DVD-ROM when burning DVD+R discs, otherwise they'll be incompatible with many DVD players (to do this in ImgBurn select Tools > Drive > Change Book Type and select your Drive manufacturer).
Software. The only burning program you need is ImgBurn. Use it to burn ISO files, or to build ISO images from files. If you need to transcode your movie from DL to SL, use DVD Shrink which is still the best freeware transcoder and always use 2-pass encoding. 2-Pass means that before actually encoding it goes through and investigates which scenes need more compression and which need less, thereby increasing the overall quality by allocating more space for more complicated scenes.
Hardware. Burners are a dime a dozen these days, but it's always good to use the latest firmware, and a good site for this is rpc1.org. Make sure DMA is enabled for the drive. If it's not burning will be too slow, and the discs may jump or be otherwise defective in DVD Players. To check if DMA is enabled open device manager (Start > Run > "devmgmt.msc"), select IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers and click on either "Primary IDE Channel" or "Secondary IDE Channel" - or whichever your Burner is connected to (if you're not sure just check both). Rich click and select properties and open the "advanced settings tab". Transfer mode should always be on "DMA if available", and the "current transfer mode" hopefully reads Ultra DMA Mode 2 (or mode 4 or whatever). It should look something like this:
But if it doesn't, it may look like this:
Which probably means you don't have it connected to an 80-wire cable. There's a few ways to fix this problem - the best way is to use an 80-wire IDE cable. Go out buy one and connect it up. If you want an immediate solution then read on...
If you only have 1 HDD and 1 DVD-RW (and no other IDE devices), simply try disconnecting the DVD-RW from the primary cable and connect it to the secondary IDE channel (so long as you do have a second IDE cable). Even if you have more IDE devices you may still be able to connect the DVD-RW to an empty IDE Channel depending on how many your motherboard has (mine only has two).
If you can't do this - or like me you have 3 HDD's and 1 DVD-RW, then another thing that does work is setting the DVD-RW as the master device on it's cable, and the HDD as the slave. All that is required to do this is to change the jumper settings on the HDD and the DVD-RW. However do remember if you do this you may need to update your BIOS if doing this changes the boot-device (unlikely). This is how it's set up in my computer, and it does limit the HDD to DMA Mode 2 instead of DMA Mode 4, but the difference that makes to a HDD is miniscule.